This award supports the conduct of an National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program Proposal Writing Wrkshop. The workshop will be held at the University of Maryland on April 7 and 8, 2014. It is expected that there will be about 150 attendees. The workshop will have a one-and-a-half-day format including a training session on good proposal writing practices, talks by previous CAREER awardees, a mock CAREER proposal panel review, and a review session during which the attendees will have a chance to obtain reviews on project summaries of their own draft CAREER proposals. The attendees will also have an opportunity to interact with NSF Program Directors both one-on-one and in mock panels.
This workshop will help to prepare young faculty for careers in education by giving them tools and skills of good proposal writing and by preparing them to write and submit better CAREER proposals. The results of the workshop include training for young faculty, better opportunity for young faculty with an emphasis on women and minority faculty, higher award success rates for the attendees, and ultimately better research resulting from better written proposals.
An NSF CAREER Proposal Writing Workshop was held on April 7 and 8, 2014, at University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. The workshop provided future CAREER proposal submitters with proposal review experience and interactions with NSF program directors and recent NSF CAREER awardees. Intellectual Merit Sponsored by NSF CMMI Division, NSF CAREER Proposal Writing Workshops have been held every year since 2004. These workshops received good attendance and high evaluations from workshop participants. Major activities of the workshop included: 1) Presentations by NSF program directors and recent NSF CAREER awardees; 2) Mock panel review session; 3) Interactions among workshop participants, NSF program directors, and recent NSF CAREER awardees. The 2014 workshop attract over 180 assistant professors from across the country. Participants learned about the guidelines of writing a good CAREER proposal as a result of the intensive interactions during the 1.5-day Workshop. Such an experience was intended to positively impact these professors’ future career as both educators and researchers, and help develop the human resources needed for sustained growth of the engineering profession in the nation. In addition to helping these faculty members improving their proposal writing, the workshop further contributes to making the panel review process smoother and more consistent, due to the improved quality of proposals submitted in the future.
