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To be successful, your first grant proposal must sell both you and your technical ideas.
In last month's column, I suggested ways new assistant engineering professors can select a research subspecialty and identify potential grant sponsors. It now seems appropriate to share some tips on how to write a proposal that will land that first grant.
In the final analysis, a grant proposal is nothing more than an exercise in persuasive writing, and as we all know, the key to being persuasive is understanding your audience. Grants officers never want to be in the position of having to explain to their superiors that the professor "took the money and ran." For this reason and others, they tend to be cautious people who like to take minimal risks and get good returns on their investments. If new faculty members submit proposals that seem to minimize the perceived (and actual) risk to the funding agency, they can go a...