The Career Grant Writing Group is a supportive community to keep participants motivated and accountable as they work toward submitting their Career or similar grant. The group’s structure draws on research and experience demonstrating that writing productivity increases when faculty are accountable to a supportive peer community and write regularly in a semi-structured environment. The structure is based on the NSF CAREER grant call, but could be adapted to other NSF grants or other agencies.
Career Grant Writing Group participants will have one online meeting, which will serve as an opportunity to meet one another and prepare for the upcoming 12 weeks culminating with the submission of your a grant in July. In addition, over the course of the 12 weeks, participants will commit to near-daily writing (for example, a minimum of a half an hour a day) and have opportunities for mini-workshops and/or office hours on important sections of the CAREER grant, such as budget preparation and writing your budget justification, data management plans, and education plans. Resources will be available to participants through a Canvas Community that can be used for logging your progress and barriers to scheduling your writing times to analyzing your reviews if this is not your first submission of your specific research topic. Finally, participants will be paired with another peer participant to provide ongoing writing support. Applicants should already have their research topic in mind and be ready to begin (or continue) writing toward the goal of grant submission in late July 2020.
This format is based on Dr. Wendy Laura Belcher's "Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success."
Week Date
0 – Kickoff Meeting April 30
1 - Designing Your Plan for Your Grant May 7
2 - Writing Your One-Pager May 14
3 - Confirming Your Research Trajectory May 21
4 - Building Your Budget and Justification May 28
5 - Time to Review and Revise June 4
6 - Prepare for External Review June 11
7 - Pieces Parts June 18
8 - Giving, Getting, and Using Others’ Feedback June 25
9 - Review, Revise, Repeat July 2
10 - Moving to the Submission Format July 9
11 - Wrapping Up Your Grant July 16
12 - Hit Submit! July 23
Meeting Schedule
The CAREER Writing Group will be conducted online.
• Welcome and Kickoff for one hour. (Week of April 27th)
There will be optional mini-workshops and/or office hours on the following topics:
• Week 2 - Creating your NSF ID and understanding the use and submission within Fastlane/grants.gov, writing the one-pager workshop, and Talking to Your Program Officer
• Week 3 - Review of the video for your educational plan
• Week 4 - Creating and aligning your budget and budget justification,
• Week 7 - Writing your biosketch, data management plan, facilities, collaborators, and current & pending sections
• Week 8 - Writing a postdoc mentoring plan
If you are interested in attending, you may also submit questions in advance by emailing them to
Research Development.