I’ve heard a lot of advice as to how many proposals to write as an early-career faculty member. My director seems to encourage a never-ending stream, citing an older faculty member who PIs twelve proposals a year. Fellow early career friends in a different field (Earth science), whom I am surrounded by at my institute, have been told to write one or two a year to target one funded project but my friends arguably do more research, write more scientific papers, and teach more. As a space technologist, much of my research depends on having hardware and completing experiments to get results, then report on the technology performance, so I haven’t had “much” to do other than think about and write proposals. After many cursory searches, I just don’t know how many proposals to write for someone in my position so I’ve attempted to create a formal method that automates the decision-making process of “to write another proposal or not to write another proposal”.
credit: Orbital Matters
For my position, I need to fund two to three months of the year of my salary with external grants. I want to fund 6 months of my time with funded research projects. The balance that I want to strike is to make progress on current projects 50% of the time and leave the other 50% to teaching, writing proposals, side projects, service, and the other endless things I’m passionate about. I also want to pace out my projects so that I won’t be overwhelmed in starting up multiple projects at once while also providing continuity for my group of graduate students.
For general bookkeeping that goes toward this decision-making, I’ve created a spreadsheet that contains all opportunities, proposals I'm presently pursuing, pending proposals I've submitted but haven't heard from, selected proposals, then current/pending support timeline. This public spreadsheet is slightly different from my personal version. I haven’t included proposals I’ve gotten declined because funding agencies haven’t made this information public, so to be safe, I won’t either. Feel free to use my database of proposals! At the beginning, I was caught by surprise by NASA solicitations that seem to come out only a month before they’re due! Turns out that some solicitations come out every year but are only officially released the month before and as a newbie, I didn’t have this institutional knowledge. I hope this institutional knowledge doesn’t stop you from writing about your quality ideas.
The reason for each tab:
all opportunities: sometimes I become aware of annual opportunities too late so I make a note of it for next year so I have more warning next year. Apparently this is a problem specific to early faculty.
proposals I'm presently pursuing: just to keep track of deadlines, URL information
pending proposals: to keep track of when I should hear back and the expected value to tame my expectations
selected proposals: for dossier purposes
current/pending support timeline: this is my summary of selected, pending, and currently pursuing proposals.
In the proposals that I find relevant and exciting opportunities, I look at the likely success rate, the expected award amount, hours to write, and the expected award amount per hour of proposal effort. Success rate for new faculty is usually 10%, a good initial assumption, but if you know more about the rate of funding, update this number so you have a more realistic estimate of how much money you will probably receive. The expected award amount is success rate * total award amount requested. The hours to write a proposal includes the amount of time necessary to do a literature review, maybe run some preliminary experiments, organize the team, and actually write that darned proposal. This number is important to estimate the cost of hourly effort and make a trade off with the university’s evaluation of your time. The expected award amount per hour of proposal effort, or cost of doing business, is the expected award amount divided by the number of hours to write the proposal. My university values an hour of my effort at about 108 $ USD so I generally only pursue awards for which the expected award amount per hour of proposal effort is more than my hourly wage. That’s my initial decision in even deciding if this one proposal is worth pursuing, but let’s say you have many solicitations worth pursuing, how many of them should you go for?
This last tab is where that decision making happens. Each column is a month and each row is a project with the value representing the amount of FTE (full-time equivalent or percentage of my year).
The monthly breakdown shows annual FTE so I can understand how busy I'll probably be.
The sum of all row is best (or arguably worst) case scenario if everything gets funded; kind of acts like a cap in how many proposals I should write, FTE< 1.
The sum of expected commitment is most realistically how busy I'll be.
The sum of what I want is a steady, FTE = 0.5, or 6 months of a year.
The decision: I compare this expected commitment value with how busy I actually want to be, 0.5. If my expected commitment is less than 0.5, I write more proposals until that desired value is reached! If my expected commitment is more than 0.5, I wait to write another proposal until I am declined from one of the pending proposals.
I realized I tried to math myself into making a one-two dimensional decision about proposals but the decision to pursue an opportunity could be more nuanced. Some solicitations are very prestigious but don’t pay out much, like NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC). Some other solicitations, like the NSF Early Career solicitation, take a tremendous amount of work and have limited submissions so there is a potential loss to blindly pursuing an opportunity based purely upon value. I’ve also spoken to faculty who don’t have any hard or fast rules about how many proposals to write: “you would be surprised what you can handle” when talking about writing/taking on more proposals than you anticipated. The least I can do is offer you this semi-rigorous method that yields an additional dimension of decision space.
Update March 12, 2022:
Since my faculty position began in January 2020, I have raised over $1.375 million as a PI and $0.95 million as a co-I or senior personnel under my direct control or $2.3 million total. I’ve participated in a total $40M worth of unsuccessful proposals, $4.5M of which I led. I have 3 or 4 projects to manage depending on how you look at it and oh nelly, I think 3-4 projects are enough projects that I can handle at any one time. I’m over-committed in my FTE and have since stopped writing proposals altogether so that I can focus on implementing what I wrote in these proposals. I likely won’t write proposals again until I feel like my projects can run themselves.