Homework 5

Due: Mar 5th, 2021

Assignment

  1. Read https://marktomforde.com/academic/gradstudents/AMSarticles/GrantWriting-Brennan.pdf. Focus on the two review criteria, intellectual merit and broader impact. (This article is about grants from the NSF, National Science Foundation. Other agencies and foundations use different criteria and priorities for their grants. But usually the criteria are at least somewhat similar to these NSF ones.) (You can pretty much ignore some of the other topics such as formatting, deadlines, budgeting, and reporting post-award.)

  2. Write a draft version of your mock grant proposal, including

    • Description of proposal topic
    • Why someone would want to know about your topic–the intellectual merit
    • How your project will benefit society–the broader impact
    • Your plan of how you will tackle your project.

    This is a first draft; it can be incomplete and have some gaps. The suggested total length is 1-2 pages.

    You can be somewhat creative in broader impacts. This goes beyond the direct impacts of the project within its topic. The broader impacts can be in areas such as teaching, dissemination (giving talks on your project), training students and junior researchers (e.g., if you will use grant money to pay for a grad student’s RAship), bringing mathematics to broader society and the non-mathematical community through some community activity, podcast, or something else…

    I apologize for dropping this writing assignment on you without at least 2-3 weeks to work on it. The reason is that the deadline for summer graduate fellowship applications is soon. This is being assigned now, while there’s still time to give some feedback on this draft, so that it can hopefully help your summer fellowship application.

    If you are planning to apply for a summer fellowship, and you want to use this writing to get feedback on your application, then you can switch your mock grant proposal topic to your actual research topic.

    To turn in your draft version:

    1. Upload to gradescope.
    2. Email me if it is all right to share your draft with other students in the seminar.

    You can share it with other students for more feedback from them, but you don’t have to.

In the next 4-5 weeks we will have some more articles to read, adding to your CV and website, and more, including of course revising the draft document for your mock proposal.