 Okay, so it's my pleasure also to finally have you guys here. Thank you for coming and I hope that you get a lot out of this workshop. I think that what is to be kept in mind is that even though it seems like some of the sessions are directed at people who for sure want to stay in academia, the skills that you will get tips and practice on and advice and support and encouragement on actually apply to any career, any job, so it's going to hopefully we'll provide that. I wanted to mention that this is being webcast live and so we have people who quite a few people who were not able to attend 35 about and I sent out the link so there some of them out there watching and hi there out there and out there. Let's see so some of the things that will be webcast include the panels in the morning and a couple of the afternoon sessions. I can share that link with everybody here as well. So what we have today is the first of the major topics that you guys spoke about as being an area of interest for the workshop in your in the survey which was proposal writing and we have today an excellent panel of people who have a lot of experience either writing or overseeing or both proposals and I would like to introduce them. On your left we have a senior scientist Marika Holland who is here at NCAR in the climate and global dynamics laboratory and her research interests are related to the role of sea ice and polar regions in the climate system including ice, ocean, atmosphere feedback mechanisms, high latitude climate variability and abrupt climate change. In the middle we have Lawrence Buja the director of the climate science and applications program, CSAP at NCAR here. CSAP addresses societal vulnerability, impacts and adaptation to climate change through the use of scenarios of projected climate change, development of tools and methods for analyzing current and future vulnerability and integrated analyses of climate impacts and adaptation at local, regional and global scales. And you've already met Manda Adams who is the program director for education and cross-discipline activities in the atmospheric and geospace sciences division of the National Science Foundation. Before coming to NSF Manda was an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Charlotte and she is on the board of directors for the earth science women's network. So let's just give a warm thank you to them for coming today. Okay so and the way that this is going to work is each of our panelists is going to give a little introduction of themselves and their experience around proposals and and then I will ask a question that they can each respond to and then I will turn over to you so that you guys can ask further questions. We have two microphones on stands one over here and one over here. Please do speak into the mic for your question so that not only everybody here can hear it but the people who are listening from somewhere else on the webcast can hear it. So with that I guess I would first like to call on Marika to introduce yourself. Hi okay so this is working it sounds like my voice is I think I'm getting a cold so my voice is getting a little scratchy so hopefully you can all understand what I'm saying. So yeah I'm Marika Holland I'm a senior scientist here at NCAR and I came to NCAR in 1991, 1999 sorry, I'm adding a few years on to my career and it was funny because Jim's story about you know getting into a PhD program because of his baseball and bowling skills reminded me that my first postdoc so I did a postdoc in Canada and my advisor when he asked my referees to write letters he specifically asked them to talk about not just my science but other activities I was interested in. So I'm pretty sure I got my first postdoc because I was the captain of our intramural hockey team and this was in Canada and that was very impressive the first thing he asked me about when I showed up as a postdoc was about my hockey playing skills. So anyway I think it points out one of the things Jen said that you know you should follow your passions a little bit and that includes not just scientifically but overall work-wise and that helps you kind of adjust and figure out what your work-life balance should look like. So that was just a little bit of an aside. So yeah I've been at NCAR for quite a few years and I study polar science and I also work a lot on our community or system modeling project. So I've served as chief scientist for that project and I've helped in model development and things like that. So in terms of proposals I wrote down notes because I figured I'd probably forget this. So I have had proposals funded through NSF polar programs through NASA through NOAA and these proposals have kind of spanned the range of what you could imagine. So a lot of them have the majority of them have been research proposals and those have generally been very collaborative so multiple institutions people in the university community including students and postdocs and things like that. So kind of what you typically think of I've also had proposals funded to organize workshops and some interesting things like organizing workshops on the Arctic sea ice. So it's one of the benefits of being a polar scientist. You get to go see polar bears like Jen or go out on to the ice. So I've done things like that. I've also gained a lot of knowledge through serving on panel reviews for proposals and also reviewing just mail-in reviews. So you get a lot of insights into what's good and bad based on that in terms of proposals. And I think that's mostly it because I think your question to us you wanted us to address later. Is that right? Okay. Okay. So yeah. So here's Lawrence. Thanks. Lawrence Buja direct climate science applications program. You'll hear this theme not too many years ago. We were all sitting in your chairs kind of wondering what the future would hold. And so I just encourage you to have courage because great things will happen. I started my career out in the core climate model development and application teams with the same group that Marika is involved with. And it was immense amount of fun running on the fastest supercomputers on the planet, getting access to top secret machines around the world, luring, seducing plasma physics experts from Department of Energy away from designing the next nuclear W88 bomb to come work on environmental things. Great, great experience. And it really culminated with the 2007 IPCC that got the Nobel Prize where Warren Washington gave me one instruction when he brought me into his group, make sure NCAR has a big impact. And so I did. And we had the largest contribution of any modeling group in the world to that IPCC simulations. And but once the report came out, almost overnight, the question changed. And enough people in public industry and the government bought our assertion that anthropogenic climate change was going on, that we could move on. We'd been stuck in this endless cycle of trying to demonstrate it again and again. And some of the fault was our own because we didn't communicate our results well enough. And so that's a big point here is you need to learn how to communicate. But in 2007, I said, this is like being a Houston Mission Control for NASA when Apollo 11 came back from the moon. I don't need to do this again. I don't want to do this again. The question has changed. To what is the impact on this coming of this coming climate change on the coupled human natural system? And that doesn't mean that we need to put away those tools. Actually, we need much, much better tools than we had developed at that point. So to my climate modeling ex ex colleagues or still colleagues, I say, we need actually more and more focus on that area. But now I run one of the big social science programs here to look at how does this bridge into decision making, human security, many, many different elements for me. It's it's a ton of fun. And so I've been involved with a wide range of proposals through this whole area. So and actually, I'm keeping notes because if you think you have to multitask now, just get used to it. It goes on because I've been here since six a.m. preparing for the retreat for my group that I'm running minutes after I leave here. And so I wrote notes just so I would kind of honor your your time here and not miss anything. So small, everything from 5k internal proposals that take an hour to create for visitors, diversity programs, workshops and travel, medium sized ones, 50 to 500,000 research concepts. These typically take a week to a month to put together. These are stuff for, say, USDA and global food security and climate change. Some of the big data spokes calls that we're out recently, we're doing one for the Defense Department Minerva program on early warning systems for societal instability based on mixed environmental technology and other stressors. Large one to $2 million multi year scientific research proposals, these take several months to put together. And so these involve some with the Inter-American Development Bank on how do we help them plan to alleviate climate change impacts in Central South America. And one through NSF, EASM, I don't know if that rings any bells on how do we bridge the climate modeling again into the social side. I worked on some very large proposals, $10 million successful proposals, $10 million. These take about a half year to put together. One of these was the DOE cooperative agreement that funded much of the climate model application research here in collaboration with the US Department of Energy. And with that one, we would submit it, prepare and submit it six months early. So that the internal program managers had time to shop it around, get support, tell us, well, this one isn't really a strong leg to this, could you change it to that? And it gave the program managers time to provide some guidance on how we could do better. And the other element there was $10 million in supercomputing time on a big DOE machines. So we would put together a national consortium and say, you take this part, the ICE modeling, you take that part, the coupling, the atmosphere model, we put together a proposal that was almost too big to fail to the Department of Energy to use their own super computers, and then kind of coordinate and make sure that these big simulations all got done. That was a ton of fun. And again, it was tens of millions of dollars, but it wasn't in terms of dollars. It was computing time. And probably the biggest one, a massive one I was involved with is here, the $70 million proposal for the NCAR Wyoming supercomputer center, where we had outgrown the capacity of the supercomputers up on the Mesa. We couldn't bring more power up there. And this was an amazing project. I just come out of a leadership training program and got called on to co-lead the launch phase. We had a $60 million building to build. And we had zero dollars in the bank. What were we going to do? So we partnered with universities, the state of Wyoming, and it called on things I was never trained to do. I was giving a presentation to the governor of Wyoming. They've got billions of dollars in resource extraction fees that they want to turn into infrastructure. And I have this beautiful eye candy presentation on what we were thinking about. And he says, I'll put that away. I hate PowerPoint. Just talk to me. I've got the senior vice presidents and presidents and directors of NCAR and UCAR all sitting around the table looking at me. And I had to give that presentation. And we knew it well enough that that we did. And they bought off on it and brought tremendous amount of resources. And so you're going to be called on to do things you weren't prepared to do. But you're good enough to do. So it's just be flexible. And I'll talk about some of the other things as we move on. Good morning. So I was thinking about my proposal writing experience. And actually, I have a lot of experience writing proposals that get declined. So I'll just say that. But first proposal I ever wrote, I wrote it by PhD advisor submitted it under his name, but I wrote it and it came about because I'd finished my master's. I wasn't quite sure what I was doing with my PhD. And he came into my office and he says, So there's this group that wants to do this field campaign in Antarctica. And they want us to write a proposal with them. We're printing a whole bunch of proposals and they want us to write one. He's like, I think you should take the lead. And I looked at him and I said, I don't know anything about Antarctica. And he said, you have a month. And it got declined. But it ended up actually being what my PhD dissertation was on. Because after I wrote the proposal, I was like, someone should really do this. Like this is really cool stuff. So I've I've written lots of proposals and gotten lots declined when I was a postdoc and as a faculty. I have had success. I've had some funded. But I also now that I work at NSF, I'm on the other side. So I see hundreds of proposals every year. And if there's one thing that I hope that you guys will take very seriously when I say it, it's that we decline lots of really good proposals. So if you get a decline, it doesn't mean it's a bad proposal. We just don't have enough money to fund all of the great ideas out there. I mean, there's people who have Nobel prizes that we decline. So anytime you do get a decline, which you will because everybody does at some point. Try it's hard to do I know this but try not to take it personally and try and really take the comments from the reviewers. If there's a panel summary, those if there's any comments from the program officer and really trying to digest them and figure out what how you can use them to make it better. But it doesn't mean that it's a bad idea. It just means that it just at that right moment wasn't exactly the right thing. But it doesn't mean that it was a bad proposal because we just can't find all the great stuff. There's just not enough money. And I mean, that's one of the hardest parts about my job is I I decline lots of things that are really awesome. And I would love to fund but we just don't have enough money for thank you. Okay, I would like to start by asking each of you. Think now knowing having the experience and insight that you have now. Thinking back to being in their seats. If you were to give yourself or them back and you know back then, advice, if you could think of one or two things, what would be the most important things that you would say? Yeah. So I'm sure we'll we'll have lots of things to say over the course of this. But I think one one thing is to educate yourself on what a good proposal looks like. And there's there's multiple ways to do this. But I think one of the most valuable ways is to serve on a panel for proposal reviews, because you well, it's a huge amount of work first, just to get that out of the way. But it's also really, really useful in that you read a lot of proposals, you get to compare them, you get to kind of make your own decisions about what makes a good proposal and a bad proposal. But then you also sit around a table with your colleagues, and you discuss what makes a good proposal and what makes a good bad proposal. And so you get a lot of insight into not just your own opinions, but what other people in the community think is is necessary for a good proposal. So I would highly encourage if you have the opportunity to serve on a panel review. And it is a lot of work. It does take a lot of time. But I think it gives you just a lot of really good information about what's good and bad. The other thing is I'd like to just emphasize what Amanda said is you will get declines and proposals. And that's one of the hardest things that's going to happen is you'll submit something you're really excited about. It's a great idea, you know, and it'll come back as a decline. And don't get disheartened. It happens to everyone. You know, there's just not enough dollars to fund all the great science that's proposed. So, you know, take a deep breath and take a step back and look at the reviews carefully and revise and resubmit. If you think it's a great idea, that's, you know, that's a perfectly appropriate thing to do. So I think those are kind of two pieces of advice for now. And I'm sure as questions come up, there'll be more. But so, of course, agree with everything that Marika just said. So the one thing I say is split into four pieces. So first, be confident yourself that the talents you have are what the world needs. We get so excited when we get new postdocs in new ideas, you have different ways of doing research than what we grew up in. You have different ideas, you have ways of integrating you've you've grown up in an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary world. We need your experience. And so, be very confident in confident in yourself. I have two two requirements for collaborators need to be smart. And they need to be nice or kind or worse. And you ignore those or I ignore those of my peril. And once I brought a very, very smart person into a proposal who was not nice. And it caused tremendous damage. Stakeholders, real world people with trillion dollar decisions to make on water infrastructure were alienated. We were working with to get Barbara Boxer on to put a big chunk of money to fund this project into the into the legislation. And this not nice collaborator mind turned an ally who had been courting for years, and bringing the meetings into an enemy to where they said, Do not work with this group. So be very careful with with working with not nice people. So and if you're in this room, chances are you're a nice person. So also, I mean, this is being being a successful grant writer gives you great job security. When I was writing the DOE cooperative agreements, I knew what my raises were for the next five years. It was awesome. Second one, big awards are just not that much more work than small awards. So go big whenever you can. They may be more competitive to get. But really, the amount of work you do with 10 small grants can be crippling as you try to multitask. So on on my scientists computers, a lot of times I have a big sticky note that says 300 K on it. This is if you get asked to be involved with a proposal, if it's less than that, I want to know why it's so important. Just because of the time it takes to spin up on many different proposals is tough. You talked about being on review panels. You don't you don't want to fail in terms of not with the project itself, but in communicating with your sponsor, your program manager. So talk with them a lot, feed them your materials, your research output, your PR materials, your posters, give them something to talk about within their programs to show what's going on with the projects they're funded. That'll help keep them as your best allies. There's a secret agenda here. And I talked about that with my table here when at the beginning. It's you're gonna learn a lot of great things. You might even remember a few of them. But the secret agenda here is to network and start right now. Look around you, the folks in this room will be the program managers, the deans, the center directors 15, 10 years from now. So and don't talk to your own species. If you're a climate model or go find a social scientist or biogeochemists, because when you put together interdisciplinary teams, you don't need five climate modelers, you need a nice balanced team. So take the time today, because the folks I was attending programs like this back in the 80s are my chief collaborators. We built consulting companies together. I bought my first Jaguar by by working with a buddy that I had that we went out drinking together and said, let's do this. These folks and now now I handed him a quarter of a million dollar project. And he took it and ran with it. Now his part is bigger than my own. So the folks in this room get to know each other. Figure out who you want to work with because you'll build your careers on that. And then finally, a lot of it is about people. The federal agencies tend to be more formal and rigorous. Other funding groups are more about the people. I was able to get a million dollar contract out of one of the development banks, because I went to some meetings and got to know what they needed to know. And they got to know me as a person. And as one of the junior folks moved into a big position at another development bank, his kind of connection list of connections was really small and he needed a climate element. So he called me. So it's both being technically ready, but also getting out there and knowing about the network. So I think that will stop it. So I would echo the the thoughts on trying to serve on a panel or to review proposals. And you can always contact the program officer of whatever program and just send them an email and say, I'm really interested in serving as a reviewer for this program. You know, please keep me in mind you can send your CV with them because we are always looking for reviewers. Every proposal we get, we have to get a minimum of three, but usually we aim for four reviews. So that's four people we need for every proposal that comes in. So we are always looking for people. But even if you don't get an opportunity to review proposals, another really good advice to try and know what a good proposal looks like is you can search on the NSF webpage of what we've funded and then you can reach out to those PIs that have been funded and just say to them, hey, would you mind sharing your proposal with me that was that was funded so that I can see what a good proposal looks like. I mean, most people are very flattered that somebody thinks they have a good proposal and they, you know, and especially if it's been funded, they're pretty proud of that and they're willing to share it. And I would encourage you to not go to the proposal that's most closely like what you want to do because that person might feel like it's a little competitive, but just look at somebody who's in funded by the same program but doing something very different because you can learn a lot from the structure of their proposal and just get good advice just from reading it. I always say good proposals are like art. Like you know it when you see it, but it's really hard to kind of describe and sometimes even the best ones are the ones that there's lots of controversy over just like art where there's a lot of differing opinions and people get really riled up about. Another piece of advice for writing proposals before you submit it, I strongly encourage you to have somebody read it who's a bit removed from your research because when you write these proposals, especially if they're interdisciplinary, you have to realize that people will be looking at it from both a broad lens as well as people who have expertise specifically in that, but you might have to be writing to both types of people. And even if it is going to be reviewed by people who are all very similar to disciplinary wise, when you have somebody a little bit outside of the area read it, sometimes they see those things that nobody else sees because they're going to ask those questions that to you seem obvious because you're so close to it and so it's really helpful to get another set of eyes on it before you submit it. Thank you. And to follow on to sort of two points that Marieke and Manda made. Manda, could you talk a little bit about how, I mean, I have experience and I have heard from others that it's very useful in certain agencies dealing with certain agencies like NSF and not so much other agencies to sort of run your idea for a proposal past the program officer. And I'm wondering if you could talk about how, what is most useful or effective from your perspective as a program manager, how you like to be contacted? So I can't really speak for the other agencies but at NSF we do like to interact with our PIs. There are differences across the foundation and I think the the best first approach is always to send an email with a one to two page descriptor of what you want to do and to have specific questions. So if you just send me a one to two pager and you don't have any specific questions I'm never quite sure what to do with it but if you generally the first question is does this fit the scope of your program is usually the first question and I'll look at that and the way the reason I say email is is the best first. We have lots of things going on just like everyone else does and an email I can respond to an email at 11 p.m. or I can be this week at this workshop I will probably respond to some PIs over email but sometimes we get where people just email and they'll say can I talk to you? Well it might be three weeks before I'm going to have time to actually talk to you and I'm probably not going to want to set up a call until I know exactly what you want to talk about but that being said if you have specific questions when you send your little descriptor in specific questions if it's questions that I feel are best just in a phone call then I'll usually respond saying you know let's set up a time to talk because there's some things that's easier for us to to communicate over a phone call or other things it's better for us to to put in writing and I think one of the the other things that can be a bit frustrating when you're new to NSF is our role as program officers while we want to interact with you and give you guidance we're always cognizant of we can't give anybody an unfair advantage and so sometimes there's things that we seem like we're being kind of vague and we're not giving you the the yes or no answer that you would like and part of that is us just being cognizant of our responsibility that we can't give you anything that gives you an unfair advantage over anybody else we can help clarify things if you have questions about the solicitation we can let you know whether something fits within the scope or if there's a part of it that we don't think fits and so maybe that aspect wouldn't be appropriate for our program we can sometimes give you guidance on what other programs might be a good place but you know email is always a good first start or if you're at meetings like AGU, AMS I strongly encourage you with those opportunities to take the time to come up and introduce yourself to a program officer then and and talk about what you're working on and also like Lawrence was saying sending us updates on stuff after you're funded is great because we internally have times when all of a sudden we'll get an email and you know the you know the division director needs three slides on the most exciting thing we've funded from something such and like we have you know we have two hours to pull together so it helps sometimes if we have information of what people have done that's really exciting that we can point to as well as you know NSF does our own you know press releases and updates on things when exciting stuff is happening and we can only do that when we know from you guys the good progress you're making thanks so much this is really great advice and on the updating so i i do this a lot and as a matter of fact last night i wrote to the three program officers at NSF including manda to thank them for funding you guys because we also added in the earth and oceans postdocs and we'll be sending photos and you know that it's unsolicited it's not a report they have to read it's an email where they can go oh look at these cool photos of this person doing fieldwork or of some organism they found under the microscope or something like that it's kind of cool for them so i'd like to open it up to you guys to ask questions and so if any of you would like to go to the mic we are ready for your questions yes be brave and if you could introduce yourself that would be great i'm sierra i'm a oceansines postdoc at university of michigan my question is how many proposals do you have going at one time how many are submitted or in progress or waiting to hear um because obviously success rate is not a hundred percent but how do you juggle uh how many you should have going at once i think i think it's very dependent on your position and so it's a it's going to be different if you're a faculty uh person or if you're at a place like n car so um me personally i mean right now i have um three plus so so three proposals that are research proposals um and one proposal that is for a workshop um that'll happen this may and so all the funds for that are really just for a workshop and then some publication funds um and but um and under that i fund two associate scientists here at n car through those um proposals essentially so that's what i'm always thinking of is is making sure that those people remain funded and so i submit proposals accordingly to make sure that those people remain funded um i also you know will occasionally write proposals that include postdocs um and like i said being at n car we collaborate very strongly with the university community so all of these are actually proposals that are joint with the university community and they include graduate students and postdocs at other institutions as well um but i think you know you can get into this rat race of spending more time writing proposals than actually doing your science finding that balance i think is is challenging um and i think it's probably uh something that young faculty really struggle with um and i do collaborate quite closely with some young faculty former postdocs who are in that process right now of trying to figure out how to do this um i don't know if i have any great words of wisdom maybe maybe laurence does it's it's hard to figure out that balance um but you know checking with your colleagues at the institution you're at checking with your peers um you know people that you meet in this room perhaps i mean i think you know keeping that conversation going uh with people that are kind of at the same career stage as you is is helpful to get information on um what's appropriate what you need to to do so i have a similar number going and uh three or four you know everything ranging from some small research projects to how do we set up an NCAR for the social science as a national level center uh another one involving a regional climate science education and services center in fiji um the stuff stuff that i really find interesting one for USAID on uh seasonal forecasting information for decision making so to a certain degree i tell my scientists we have flat or declining budgets zero is the new up if you're just staying at a zero budget you're actually declining by three to six percent per year um that's simply the reality and if you want to grow your program you need to get aggressive and go out there and write proposals and by the way the normal channels are chock full of amazing proposals so think outside your normal boundaries how do we work with uh the intelligence agencies say who have a real need for some of the looks forward that they can't do right now how do we work with the international development company uh sector um how do we work with private companies uh we we just formed an alliance with IBM with their Watson Center who bought the weather channel and then a weather company and then farmed off the weather channel because they wanted the core service technology on weather and climate forecasting so um yet think imaginatively but you know typically we have three to four going for every every scientist thank you next question i have a question as far as scale um from the perspective of a program agency so um how do you determine the correct amount of money to ask for in these times of where zero is the new you know it's a neck decline in budget for example if he requires x amount of dollars to do a certain amount of work uh miserable it's not a very large number is it beneficial to ask for x amount of dollars or to ask for a bit more to do extra stuff or a bit less to at least get something funded so uh some of the programs i work on have uh in the solicitation there's like a cap on the budget and others don't have one and anytime there's a cap several programs i work on have a three million dollar cap and i would say 95 percent of the proposals come in at 2.99 um however i will say that both nsf and panelists can see very quickly when there's a lot of fat to be trimmed in the budget and so my advice is always propose what you need to do the work you're going to do and it can go both ways like there's times when sometimes some solicitations have two levels um so one of them i work on dynamics of couple natural and human systems there's smalls that have a cap of 500k and the largest have a cap of 1.8 million and so there's people sometimes will contact us and they'll say i think i'm at like 700k should i try and get it down to 500 so it's a small and my response to them is you need to propose what you need to do what you need because we see sometimes where people say i don't think they can do that for that amount of money and so so that becomes a negative but then also when people look at and they go they're asking for 1.8 million and they don't they don't need it and and we as program officers before we make an award we we look at the budgets we scrutinize them and we often cut um we can cut up to 10 percent of your budget without you having a single thing to say about it if we cut more than 10 percent then we go to you and we'll give you this is the bottom line and i need a new revised budget at that amount and you have to tell me if that new amount changes the the scope of what you can do um and then we also will sometimes give clear guidance of we never tell you what to cut but we'll tell you what we want to see kept in which essentially tells you what you are left to cut from um so really just propose what you need and be be realistic about it and that's probably the best chance of of success because both program officers and the reviewers know what's what's reasonable um one question that i have is just stepping back a little bit and it goes to what laurence um talked about is sort of finding the outside of the box calls for proposals because um i know sometimes those can you know you've got the usual suspects that you that you might go to but um sometimes i find that i have a lot of success with the outside of the box ones and i was just wondering if you can speak to methods for finding um some of those more unusual funding opportunities sure uh well the starting place is grants.gov so if you haven't visited go visit there because that's where the federal agencies launch a lot of their projects but if you discover a call on grants.gov being released today that's due a month from now you're already about three or four months behind your competition because these proposals don't spring out that day from the head of the program manager chances are they've had organizational meetings on the previous two years to see what the community really needs. NSF does this department of energy so if i see a department of energy workshop on climate change and urban emissions i start to think well this is probably going to be a call that's going to be coming out in a year or two one how do i get to that meeting because i have a scientist who specializes in that area i want to help form kind of what that call is going to look like and they'll make sure that it's not too competitive but i've seen cases where the people on the formation committee kind of tilt it to their strengths and they know it six months to a year ahead of time so they prepare for it also keep your ears open we had a nice a nice presentation yesterday by the lead of a major a major research international research initiative this is by the way we're connected with this other funding group and and we're preparing a big ocean sciences call it's going to show up in about six months for about 20 million bucks so then all of a sudden you know all right well fortunately i don't have anything to do with oceans so i don't have to do anything to prepare for that one but you you attend the meetings you keep your ears open again build your networks other times i will go to meetings i had an experience with the nga the national geospatial intelligence agency where they asked about climate and i went and gave a couple nice presentations about everything we were doing but left it at that and after the third one i said okay i need to fund some scientists i'm going to do a different this third one's going to be a sales pitch here's what we do and here's what we want to do with you with this amount of money and that third one actually then got me the conversations got me inside their top secret buildings got me to look at what's going on and where their needs for science was and where we could start working together so some of it is just being assertive saying this is the direction i want to move into international development i do the same thing and getting into the preparatory meetings that then set up the calls but if you're just waiting for the call to come out you may you're already behind the curve so one slight difference with nsf compared to the other agencies we as nsf program officers are not allowed to say anything about a new solicitation until the day the solicitation hits the public website um so there is a bit of i mean there's times when people talk to me about ideas and it's like killing me because i there's going to be a perfect thing but it's three months out and i can't i i can't tell them so there is that difference with nsf however with really big new initiatives in nsf a good place to look is at our budget request to congress because big new initiatives will generally be in the budget request and so while there may not be a solicitation yet about it you can see things that the foundation is moving towards so for the geosciences if you look back at the last budget request for 16 there was language in there about fuse infuse which is innovations at the nexus of food energy and water systems as well as there was language about pre-events which is about risk and resilience and so even though those solicitations just came out late this spring and there were dear colleague letters with them back in 15 when you were looking at our fiscal year request for 16 there was language in about them so you can get an idea of where we're going even if we don't have a solicitation yet and then you can potentially ask program officers just what you know what's with this initiative and there might not be you know anything specific another one right now is includes which is a big nsf wide diversity initiative and there was budget language in about includes for the last year and the solicitation just came out like a week or so ago about it so that's a good place to get an idea of things that might be coming down the line so just to follow up on this question about tall people so just to follow up on this question about making a budget so having never been in charge of a budget I don't feel like I have a great idea of how long it takes anybody other than me sitting in front of my computer to do something so how do you put together a reasonable budget given well postdocs and that's our experience I mean I think I think getting advice from your colleagues more senior colleagues your mentors is is probably the best way to go about that because they have experience doing this and they've most likely done this successfully so they have an idea you know what it what's a good postdoc project what's a good phd you know graduate student what what kind of graduate student do in a year for example I think that's probably the best way to go about it and if there's not people like that at your institution reach out to your you know your postdoc advisor or your phd advisor because they have almost certainly done this as well so I think tapping into your mentors is is probably the best way to go about that so at the research applications laboratory we have a whole machine set up to generate these budgets where also some of it involves guesswork so I need this kind of science done I guess it's going to take a project sciences half time for two years to do this or you know we need two postdocs we want to pull them in how do we shape the proposal so it's an iterative bootstrapping but at the same time serving on the review panels gives you a really good sense and it'll be daunting at first because you'll see this pages and pages and pages but then after the second or third time you start to start to learn how to read those where somebody says oh we're very inclusive we have stakeholder input we're co-developing but I go to look at the part of the proposal that says participants support at workshops and there's a zero there yeah I don't believe them so part of it is just having experience of writing some and and reviewing some and working with your institutional kind of mechanisms that generate these all the time aloha you know because funding rates success is so low I feel like a lot of early career scientists fall into this pitfall of over diversifying their research scope in order to get money and I was wondering if you guys could provide some advice or speak to how we could avoid that so I think it's important to stay focused in an area of expertise and when I moved in to lead the group that I lead now for the first time I had a senior level scientist who had expertise in new two areas and it followed under the umbrella of natural resource governance she was writing some amazing material on western water law and application and then she had another side which was international fisheries and I had to say to her I need you not to be really good in two areas I need you to be a world leader in one and it broke my heart to have her shut down half of this but it was diffusing her expertise her name recognition and she could have done equally well in either one but I had to have her be kind of a world level expert in one so you really do need to keep your focus and I think that comes to some self-examination of what do you want to do what's fun for you because if it's not fun you're not going to put that much effort in if it's the thing you know you want to do that you have a passion for you'll do an awesome job at it yeah and I'll add to that I mean I think I completely agree that you know maintaining your area of expertise and becoming a world leader in a certain area and becoming known and that is incredibly important for your career but that doesn't mean you can't be on fairly broad proposals you can be I mean in my case I have a penguin proposal I'm not a biologist I don't think I've had biology since high school I don't know anything really about penguins but they need someone who knows something about sea ice right so I'm the sea ice expert on a penguin proposal it's great fun I'm learning an enormous amount so you know collaborating with people and broadening your scope in that way is perhaps a better way to go about it than trying to turn yourself into a penguin expert which you know is if your background is in sea ice physics it's not really going to happen very easily but but you can still you know there's I mean more and more work is very multi-disciplinary and you know I think kind of in atmosphere and geosciences that's definitely the case that people need that kind of expertise for a whole range of questions so tap into those communities you know and often it's just bumping into the right person at a meeting over coffee and you know and meeting a penguin biologist who says you know something about sea ice so Hi sometimes and as as an experimentalist you're you face a problem that you have a measurement that needs to be taken over a large scales to get a better sense of what background concentrations are or conditions are but sometimes that's not particularly I don't want to use the word sexy but that's the word that I'm thinking of a sexy idea and sometimes it requires that you add something to a proposal to make it more appealing do you have any recommendations on how to do that by the way if you could each introduce yourself so then we know who you are sorry Jonathan Jonathan Bent from NCAR make it a good habit for your life pardon sorry I was talking over you I'm just tripping over you sorry Jonathan Bent from NCAR EOL thank you yeah I mean I think there's always aspects of our science which aren't that sexy and but I think if it is within a proposal and I it would be interesting to hear other people's insights on this I mean you know you want it to be driven by some really compelling research questions and of course to answer those really compelling research questions occasionally you know it very often means that there's some unsexy part of the science that has to be addressed and has to be funded but you need to lead with the really big interesting exciting research questions and if you can motivate measurements or a model development or something like that which maybe you know the reviewers are going to be like ah ho hum but if that's necessary to answer that really important science question then it can fly so I think that's the way to to think about those things yeah so in NSF all proposals are reviewed for intellectual merit and broader impacts and there's a set of specific questions we ask the reviewers and it's the same questions for both of those and the first thing is is it potentially transformative and I would say sometimes some of these things that you're talking about there could be it could be potentially transformative in the broader impact in that it gives a new data set that now opens up a whole window of of investigation or it builds some sort of infrastructure for the community that that really will have a broad impact so you have to sometimes think about stuff like that now if that's all that's in the proposal if it's 90% that it's probably not going to have a a good chance because we also need intellectual merit as well as broader impacts but sometimes with broader impacts people think it's it's only education and diversity but there's actually multiple things that fall into broader impacts and one of them is how it will impact the rest of the scientific community and what kind of infrastructure it's putting in place and so there's times when we have to invest in that it's the broader impact is that it's going to allow other research down down the way because of the the observations that you're now going to have or the data set you're now going to have or the model that's now developed that can lead to other other questions so I think it's it's sometimes about understanding in which way you need to frame it to sell it to the reviewers and to the program officers Hi, I'm Michael Peterson and Carl Rall in HAO I've been interested myself previously I have a question about diversification going back to that topic actually interesting experience I had a similar kind of with your penguin thing but with African elephants so I'm on a research paper on that but I'm in a very small field with lightning science it's one that you know has received a lot of attention recently but is there for a the field like that where it's so small and there are very few job possibilities and even proposals out there is there additional merit in diversifying your career path and David I'm going to be having the insights about that I mean I think there is merit and I think as you grow through your career you will you know and everybody's path is different I think that that's very true I don't think that exploring things outside of you know what your PhD topic was on or your postdoctoral research was on I think those are good things it's good to kind of broaden your research and maybe even shift your research if that's where your interests take you and sometimes the practicality of where the funding is as well so I think that's perfectly acceptable to do that but I think you do have to be careful not to try and keep everything going so if it's something that is related to the work you've been doing in the past and kind of a natural extension of that or a natural shift then you can remain you know continue to work in the field that you've been working on and and broaden somewhat if it's a complete you know 180 degree shift well maybe that means that you leave behind the work that you did in your graduate studies and and don't no longer remain the expert or build the expertise in that area so you have to there's a balance and I think everybody's balance is a little different and what works for one person isn't going to work for the other so you know you kind of have to muddle through and figure out what the best path is for you but you do see people that are so broad and so diversified that they're not considered an expert in any single area and at a certain point that will hurt your career I think so you have to kind of do this thoughtfully but I think I mean I've seen people who have really switched their research area and kind of using the expertise they they got in their graduate student days and their postdoc but really switched to a separate area and done incredibly well so I don't think there's anything wrong with that it's just you know you have to be thoughtful about how you do that and how broad you become Hi Julia Gaucklitz from Woods Hole Asianographic Institution kind of piggybacking on that a little how do you find identity in your proposal separate from your research advisors if the science is similarly motivated I mean I do think that that one thing that's looked for you know as you advance in your career and being on search committees and things like that is is that someone is doing their own research and not just doing the research that their advisors still advising them to do sort of and so often that means it does mean broadening out from like the graduate work that you've done so for me specifically okay so an example my graduate research was on single column models of sea ice okay so they were very it was very much about the physics in the ice model the details of melt ponds and and bells and whistles and the impacts that have okay that was great when I went and did my postdoc I started working with global models now the questions you can address with those I mean I was still working on the sea ice part of those but I broadened it to this global picture looking at polar feedbacks more generally you know it it was still in the same research area I could use the expertise I'd gained in my graduate school but it was very distinctly different from what my graduate advisor had done and so I think trying to find ways to do that while you're still building on the expertise you gained in school and in your postdoc but you're kind of taking it in directions that are your directions and not the directions that your advisor might have and sometimes that means I mean a lot in a lot of cases how I've done that through my career is is by collaborating with people and and kind of you know dreaming up research questions that are a little bit different than what I did you know the last five years and so the people you work with can very much help you know kind of steer how this goes through your career and help you broaden while still maintaining your kind of identity and your expertise in that and your niche which I think is important I don't know if that helps but so it's throughout my career I always I made some changes that people thought I was I was changing directions but I always knew exactly what skills I was taking from what I did before that were now applied to the next so my master's thesis I was looking at convective boundary layers with lake effects now then my phd I went to doing topographic flows in Antarctica but the commonality was I was doing mesoscale modeling and I was doing something that was forced from below I just went from a warm lake to very cold stable boundary layer then when I did my postdoc I went and I started doing stuff with with wind energy and also with glacier atmosphere interactions and they hired me as a postdoc because I knew mesoscale models I knew boundary layer parameterizations I didn't know anything about about wind energy but I knew I knew those parts of the model and so that got me off on a track very different than than my my phd advisor who's actually more of like a hurricane person and it but I've always been in the mesoscale modeling realm and then after my postdoc when I was a faculty member I got on the AMS's energy committee and I was interacting a lot with industry in the energy sector and I started having my students work on projects with data from energy companies and I started actually having them work on some questions that actually had no modeling but now I was taking what I knew about the energy sector and so every time I to me it was a logical progression but I did keep kind of changing and I'm now very different than my than my phd advisor but it was it was with small incremental changes where I was taking the skills I had and now applying them to a new area and sometimes it's recognizing what's limiting me forget it from getting a better or more accurate answer when I started out we were setting off big thermal events in the in the western Pacific to watch the wave trains move across the mid latitudes but it's the models were too the global models were too low resolution to actually get that to the decision space and so I then moved into how do we improve the models how do we do embedded grids how do we go to higher resolutions new algorithms so it comes about from your own curiosity as you become more and more familiar with your area and start to realize boy if only this was improved then we can do that better so some of it just comes out of yourself as well Hi my name is Karen McKinnon I'm an NCAR ASP postdoc and I want to return to the out of the box funding question from before but specifically about private companies or private foundations which sounds like at least Amanda and Lawrence and maybe Marika have experience with in terms of maybe even an example of how do you go from kind of being in this grant space to actually contacting and reaching out to these private foundations of private companies because seems like that's where a lot of money is nowadays in this country thank you So an experience from our group we've had Google Foundation funding looking at meningitis and that's a hell and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation support to look at gender differentiators for the effectiveness of malaria interventions in Indonesia and Africa and that stemmed from one of these scientists becoming a leading public voice in the vector-borne disease So she started some boards I believe at AMS got involved with some of the presidential initiatives and had such high exposure and was a compelling speaker on the topic of vector-borne diseases that as the foundations started to get interested in that they said who are the world expert who was on the national climate assessment for health she got no support I mean she got internal support to participate but that was at a cost to her career to be involved with the national climate assessment but the foundation people read that went through the author list and said oh we've got this new thing come help us design it and would you be a PI on this So part of it is increasing your exposure in the community learning how to communicate your science in a beautiful way that's compelling people will hear it who you have no idea even exist so a lot of the stuff I've done with the energy sector it came about by getting on the AMS energy committee and I was all of a sudden I knew people in in industry but I started off by just listening a lot and then I started asking them questions and I said so what's that thing that you guys really want to know but you don't have time to do in your world where you have day to day deliverables that like there's that nagging question that you can't get to I said because I got students and they got time that's that's what I started telling to my so what's that thing that I was and I started I started small with undergrads and then eventually you know one of my master students I got proprietary data from excel energy to look at stuff with relate to icing events with their wind farms but it started with with small me not saying I'm an act you know an academic person that's going to fix and do all these great things for your industry I just kept asking what's the thing that you can't get to because one thing we have is time in academia compared compared to industry at least and so I started that way I also one summer I needed to go back to Chicago for the summer to help out with some family things and so I reached out to the meteorologists at Chesapeake Energy who were in downtown Chicago and I said I'm going to spend the summer in Chicago because of family stuff but I'll go insane if I'm with my family 24 seven so what would you guys think about me coming into the office and they're like that would be awesome and so I I spent a summer where I was taking the train into the city and I was sitting in their office and we had no we had no research agenda I didn't have a project with them I was just learning about what they did so that I could understand what kind of research questions I could do that could could help them and so sometimes you have to put a little bit into it and but then you build up those relationships like Lawrence was saying and that's what with industry I think has worked is building up the relationships that they they trust that you understand what their what their needs are and you're going to actually do something that's going to be helpful to them if I could add one more thing she used Amanda used a very important word called trust and that comes through interaction and time and listening so I can't overemphasize the the importance of that word trust both do you trust them and do they trust you we have a couple more time for a couple more minutes go ahead hi I'm Matt Igel I'm a PRF at the University of Miami so recently I was asked to be a sort of low-ranking co-eye on a proposal and the PIs had sold me on what I thought was a pretty good idea but when I actually got a copy of the proposal in my assessment it was relatively poor so how do you balance sort of not wanting to take over someone else's proposal really high quality hard especially if they're more senior than you and so you're the junior person on the project I mean I think you know proposals take a lot of time and and you do have to be really careful about especially if it's something that has you know just a very small piece for you or something like that I'm spending an enormous amount of time to make someone else's proposal better I would I would caution you before doing that I mean it's it's a delicate situation though because you know you also don't want your name on something that you don't feel comfortable or or proud of so and sometimes asking to have your name removed from something is is a statement in its own right so it's a it's a hard call but I think and as you move through your career you're probably we'll see this a bit more I mean you see this with reviewing proposals as well and reviewing papers that you know I mean I think the first time I reviewed papers I'd get a crummy paper to review and I would spend days basically rewriting their paper and at a certain point it's like no no no this isn't this isn't my job and I think you have to you have to be careful with that with being a co-eye with perhaps not much funding going to yourself on a proposal but there's other issues that come into it like the other colleagues on the proposal and whether you want to work with them in the future and how that might play out and all of those things and that in some respects becomes a personal decision on I want you feel comfortable but spending a lot of time investing in a proposal that isn't going to have much benefit to you or your career especially when you're an early career stage be cautious I guess would be my advice I would say try and balance your efforts to be in line with how much support you would get if the proposal is funded so even though I mean I think this gets back to letting go of the perfectionism that was brought up at the very beginning if it's something that you even if it's funded you're not going to get very much out of it don't waste a lot of energy trying trying to fix it and just and don't get caught up in it now if it's something that is going to be a substantial part of your funding then I think you need to learn to navigate that and it's not easy and be assertive to make sure that it's a true representation of the science you want to do because it is if it's funded going to be a significant part of of what you're working on and so I would say that's where you put the effort in in line with how much you're going to actually get out of it in terms of support for yourself and sometimes I will say well why don't you put my support down to zero I'm interested in this I'll advise it I'll tend to attend the workshops just throw some travel in there for me but if it's a topic that either I don't I'm not an expert in or something like that I'll back way off on what the level of support is and and like Marika said it's okay to to withdraw from a proposal and the sooner you can do that the better for the whole team my name is Andrew Caller I'm a NSF postdoc at UCLA and Earth Space Planetary Sciences so my question is and it's somewhat related to that but on the end of it I guess there's a there's a balance between building your resume and obtaining funding and it seems to me that one has a better shot at obtaining funding if the lead PI on a proposal even if a co-PI is the person who basically writes most of it if the lead PI who's experienced and not so early career is the person who submits it seems to me you have a leg up of actually getting the funding as opposed to trying to be the lead lead PI yourself is that actually true first of all and then second of all if it is true is writing a collaborative proposal and maybe a multi-institution collaborative proposal of what basically a way around that problem so it is not true that it's more likely to be funded if the lead PI is is more experienced one of the things that we look at is portfolio balance which includes not only a diversity of the type of science we're funding but a diversity of the PI's we're funding in terms of career stage gender racial diversity the type of institution they're at or they add an R1 or they add an undergraduate only and we want to have a diverse group that we're funding so there's not I would say the one place it might be an advantage are the really really large you know if if they're you know if it's a five million dollar proposal and the person has never had funding before we probably want to see someone with experience that's if that there's going to be a large team managed but if it's a standard NSF proposal I don't think having the lead PI be be someone more senior has any sort of advantage over it being a new investigator I think it's important that the reviewers can see what each person's contribution are and they understand that that both people need to be there that's not that one person's there just to make it look better that they're both you know contributing in an important way and then as far as your question with collaborative proposals there's just some difference in that with the collaborative proposals each institution the PI from for that institution then has the responsibilities in terms of funding and they're actually separate awards and so there's a lot of just administrative differences and a collaborative proposal can either be where each institution submits ones and they're kind of a group or there can be ones where there's a lead and then they do sub awards to the others and certain solicitations will require it to be one way or the other but a collaborative can be a way that if you could be a junior person where you're the lead at your institution on a much bigger one but you get the experience being the person responsible for reporting and managing at your university but there's lots of different ways that that you can go about doing that so for particularly the large proposals it doesn't hurt to have an elephant on there of a big name this was not with NSF but an experience I had with writing a big proposal I'd watched another group submit a proposal for a nice concept that we were associated with this group it was a doorstop proposal and that got rejected by that agency I was writing a big proposal to them and somewhere down on page 10 I said by the way we want to look at this phenomena and we're able to fund that group anyway because we had a big name at the top of it who for this this agency tended to get automatically funded so there's different different agencies have different rules I like how NSF does it they're very fair almost to a certain point blind at the same time they do recognize where if there's a Nobel Prize winner on there or someone who's made a significant contribution to the field and that they really have a a real place in the proposal recognizing that as well I just wanted to add that I think it's also important for your career to lead projects and so you know in terms of so being a PI on a proposal when you go up for a faculty interview or you go you know that those things are considered very seriously and so always being the junior partner on a proposal is not a great idea so you want a balance of things you know and and it's good to be to be able to go into a room and say yes this I'm leading this project I'm the PI I built the team I you know and and NSF will fund those things so even if you're quite junior also I don't know if anybody is aware of what an EPSCORE state is so there's certain states that that have been designated they it's based on they receive less than a certain percentage of their their funding from the standard government funding agencies and so we have at NSF internal incentives to fund things from EPSCORE states and you know part of the mechanisms is even if it's an EPSCORE state you can you can look up what those are if it's somebody who's had prior NSF funding we can't go and get EPSCORE money from it because it's it's not how it's it's someone who's already established but if the lead PI has not had prior NSF funding and it's an EPSCORE state we have internal mechanisms to motivate us if it reviews well to to fund it and get some matching funds internally from other places so there can be times when it can actually be quite advantageous I would say you always want to think though carefully about always who does it make the most sense to lead in terms of the science don't try and get too caught up in strategic games but think about what is the best for the project because that is always going to trump everything else if it makes a lot of sense then it's going to do well thank you it's a I think you'll all agree that they provided some really amazing tips today and thanks for your questions it was interesting to hear what your questions were and I think they were also really insightful so we're going to wrap up this particular part of the morning and we do we will have a coffee break here in a minute and the panel will be around if you have further questions for them for people who are watching the webcast this wraps up the webcast for today tomorrow we will have the panel on writing and publishing also webcast live so thank you for joining us from out there and I just want to explain how it's working for the next session so we have a coffee break from 1030 till 1045 if you see your agenda and then we have three concurrent breakout groups and the topic is proposal writing we will have two or three people in each room leading the session and I just want to explain which room you should go to so if you look at your badge you'll see you should see a letter A, B or C and that means you need to go to room the group A, B or C so the group A is to go into the south auditorium which is right next door on this level okay and group B is to go to room 2126 so that's upstairs kind of that way and group C is in room 2503 which is upstairs and sort of that direction so and one other point before we break is that if you can take this opportunity we have a theme at each break and lunch that we hope that you will discuss with each other to kind of keep the focus going in the momentum and the theme for this break is to discuss with each other your biggest question about proposal writing so if you have a question I will yes so before we break let's just take a minute to thank our panelists for their time and their insights so thanks and let's take a break here and meet up at 10.45