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Abstract
With pressure mounting to increase extramural funding, new faculty become increasingly important to the overall effort, as this group has the greatest potential to add to the university's future crop of award winners. Ominously, evidence shows that those who fail to establish effective habits of research and writing early in their careers probably never will. The challenge new faculty present to research administration can be simply put: What is the best means to get them started on their research careers? This paper describes an approach led by the grants office that uses specially designed workshops to demystify sponsored research, build collegiality among new faculty and their more experienced colleagues, and stimulate greater participation in selected grant programs.
The Challenge
For research administrators, encouraging more proposal submissions is a constant challenge, and it is largely a game of numbers: The more proposals a given faculty member writes, the more likely s/he will find success. The higher the percentage of faculty who are actively developing proposals, the greater the growth in the university's research budget. Published data tracking the level of faculty activity in grant writing are scarce, but at many universities there is plenty of room for growth. A 1992 study of eight state colleges in New Jersey showed only 20% of the faculty were actively engaged in sponsored research that year (Monahan, 1993). At Virginia Tech, less than 50% of the combined research and teaching faculty submitted proposals in 2003, not a comforting ratio for a research university with ambitions to rise in die national rankings.
In pursuing the goal of getting more faculty to generate more proposals, grants specialists are bound to trigger some degree of resistance, as inactive faculty definitely have their reasons for not writing grants (Miner et al., 2003). New faculty are a special challenge. Fresh out of graduate school and landing their first teaching positions, newcomers can be overwhelmed by their dual responsibilities to teach and publish. It has long been recognized that the first years of teaching are highly stressful for new faculty, and that the pressing demands of preparing new classes, advising and supervising students, all while adjusting to an entirely new environment at work and at home, are among the reasons that many put research...