Speaker 1: A few months ago, I received NIH research funding that was close to a million dollars and I got it the first time I applied. So people have been asking me about research grant proposals. Hi, this is Dr. Jia, and today I'm going to share several tips on how I got there. Now, why am I talking about this? Research grants appear to be black boxes, and I'm not talking about a research proposal for a thesis, but a research proposal asking for a large sum of money. So this is a whole other ballgame. If you're not in a major institution, research institution, or don't have the right mentors, you may not have the opportunity to learn about these secrets. So I want to share my experience to benefit those who do not have such resources. So the first secret is having a huge goal. When I started having the thought of applying for a grant, I talked to people who were successful in getting that grant. I heard this advice over and over again. Oh, for K-development grants, you can't get it the first time. You need to apply two to three times. Really, they mean well, and they don't want to discourage me. Until I met one senior, and she said she got it the first time around. It saved her nine months of stress, and she could move on to active research projects and started writing her own research papers. So this mindset shift changed my goal entirely. That was to get my grant funded the first time around. And because of that, it changed how I showed up and how I approached things. So it was no longer, how do I write a slightly better grant? But how do I write an amazing grant so I could get it funded the first time? Now, when you have a huge goal, you think about what you're willing to give up to achieve that goal and what you're willing to spend to get that goal. And so one thing I did was I invested time and money to learn the best way and the fastest way to get this done. And because it's my first time around, I joined a $5,000 grant writing bootcamp that lasted for 10 weeks. And so how did I justify spending so much money? Or did I question myself whether am I going to get something out of it? But ultimately, the question wasn't, can I get something out of it? It's more, I decide that I will get a return of investment out of it by putting full effort into it. After spending $5,000 and getting a million dollar worth of grant, it means it was a return of investment of 2,000 times. Secret number two, make sure you know the rules of the game. Before I started writing the whole grant, I made sure I looked through all the application form, make sure who's eligible, scoured through the internet, YouTube, talked to friends, got examples from people who were successful. The next thing I did was to understand what the review criteria were. So I tried to make this really easy for the reviewer to score me. So I copied and pasted the reviewer criteria and made them into headings and bolded all the keywords that reviewers would look for. And I also repeated certain words to make sure that they can score me easily. Even seemingly vague things like this institution appeared to support the development of the applicant. I made sure that the letter, support letter from the institution and also the main application had certain language to support this criteria. Secret number three, write a convincing story. So before you start writing, put yourself in the shoes of the funding agency. Let's say you have $1 million to give. Don't you want to make sure that the project must be meaningful and you want the person who gets the money to spend it wisely? So that means you need to paint a strong, convincing picture about the gap, how your project aims to solve the gap, how you can move the science forward and the next steps you can do after you have completed the research project. Additionally, you must convince the reviewer that the project is feasible and can be completed in time. So next, some technical part, like this depends on the type of brand you're writing. Here for the NIH, science 8 to 12 pages, one page for specific aims. And then the other 9 to 10 pages are for the significance, research strategy and specifically for me, career development plan. Then you have the other 100 pages of business documents that includes the budget, budget justification, materials and facilities, letters of recommendation, human subjects protection, bio sketches. There were so many documents I had to prepare. So I had to make sure that I allocated time for all of that. And so that brings me to the next point. Secret number four, good time management. Writing a research grant is like doing a project with multiple targets. So you need to have project management skills. So first, identify the deadline, both the funding bodies deadline and the internal grant office deadline. Then once I had that, I reverse engineer all the things I needed to achieve before that deadline. I also work closely with the grant managers team. So I had people helping me with the administrative work. I work closely with my mentor, make sure I had weekly meetings too, so that everybody's meeting their targets and knowing what the next goals were. I also allocated time for feedback and also time to do the business documents. Every time I send something out for feedback, I didn't twiddle my thumbs doing nothing. I start working on the other business documents. And also one final tip is to make sure you request for the letters ahead of time. We're talking about two months ahead of time. So how much time did it take for me to complete my grant? So because it was my very first time writing a grant, it took me three months for the idea generation phase and for writing the first draft. And when the deadline came, I decided to push for the next cycle, which was four months later, because the idea was just not solid enough. And so after it was solid, it took me about three and a half months to complete the whole grant. And do bear in mind, this was done along with all of my clinical duties. And now number five, make sure you get sufficient feedback. And when I talk about feedback, I had two groups of people giving me feedback. One was experts and the other group was the non-experts. The experts were people within my field. They know about kidney injury. They know about my nephrology. They know about health information technology. So their role were to make sure that the science is right, whether the project is feasible, whether is it overambitious or not, or does my aim, was it a clear hypothesis, clear aim, the strategy is correct, make sure I'm not just fishing for data. Now, then the non-experts. So when I say non-experts, they're just non-expert in my field, but they are experts in their own respective field and are expert grant writers. Their roles were to check on clarity. Basically, what did they think I was trying to say or what did they hear? So the thing is, when we are in a field for a long time, we assume that people understand the importance or significance of the project. And so we tend to skip the middle bits. So I want to make sure that I was able to walk my readers through the whole creed clearly, but concisely. Now, number six, beware of comparison. So make sure you don't compare yourself with others. One thing I learned from my business coach, Dr. Una, is that we are all starting at the same time, but we're actually running different races. So although it appears that I was faster than others, that means, oh, I got it. I got my grant the first time around. If you dig deeper, I should apply for my grant two years out of my postdoctoral years. That means I applied this two years later than others. Now, why did I delay this? Simple. My foundation was just simply not strong enough. I'm not sure if you know this about me. I completed my research master's degree with zero publications. And so in the eyes of the NIH, if you can't even publish a single research paper, how are you going to handle a $700,000 or a million dollar project? So I had to build my foundations. I spent the first 18 months in my faculty job working hard on improving my academic writing skills, getting preliminary data for grant and also publishing research papers. If you're interested in improving your academic writing, check out the playlist here. But if you want to work with me in a more in-depth way, do check out my course, Stylish Academic Writing with Ease. It will be a step-by-step way to help you publish more research paper easily. Back to the grant. Number seven, the myth of chance. So the chance of getting NIH funding is about 15 to 20 percent. That means out of 10 applications, one to two people get funded. So there is this myth being perpetuated that if you apply five to eight times, you increase your chance of getting funded. Now, a grant is not like a coin toss or by random chance where the reviewers, you know, put the grant into a bag and then they randomly pick an application to fund you. Every time I submit my application to the reviewers, I actually judge my grant against all the other applications during that cycle. If all of the other grants are much better than mine, I'm not getting it. I'm not getting funded, even though it's the fifth or the 10th time I've submitted it. So make sure when you are submitting your grant, submit it only when you think your application is solid enough. I'm not talking about perfectionism here. Just make sure that you feel good about your grant and you get feedback from people who are experienced with grant funding to say, OK, this isn't even feasible, isn't even good enough to submit it. Now, I get pushback. Why? What's the downside of submitting more? The thing is, grant writing is a heavy endeavor. When I'm writing grant, I'm not really doing research and writing research papers as actively. So if I spend six months submitting various grants, I'm not really producing research papers. And in the eyes of medical institution, I'm actually not productive during that time. So there you go. These are the seven things I did to get my research funding. So if you like this video, please give me a thumbs up and I'll see you in the next video.