Starting the semester off right with your research

Well, I must have blinked, because summer break is over. Hopefully, you had a productive summer and are returning refreshed! As faculty start coming back to the classroom, it is tempting to focus on your teaching to the detriment of your research. Then, you blink again, and it's winter break. Once more, and spring is over and you're left wondering where the year went and why you didn't move your research forward as much as you'd hoped.

It's a story we hear again and again at ORDE, and we get it, juggling research, teaching, and service is a lot to manage for even the most seasoned scholar. But, in hopes of prompting you to stay on track with your research in this new academic year, we suggest you plan out your year using three key research strands: grants, pubs, and projects.

If you're a new faculty member, sometimes it can feel as though the research production game is a cycle that's hard to break into. You want money for your research, but you don't have enough pubs to be competitive for a grant. You need to complete a research project to then publish on, but you need grant funds to cover your project expenses...

So, consider what you can accomplish with each strand. Figure out what grant programs would align with your research and figure out when the deadlines are. Plan back from there. We recommend that researchers plan on six months for their grant development process, including the time spent researching the agency and reaching out/building rapport with a Program Officer.

Once those timelines are on your calendar, think about what you can do to bolster your application. Are there a couple of publications you need to finish writing based on your last project? Be sure to map those on your timeline as well. Lastly, what project are you currently working on, what is your plan to complete it? Would a smaller, internal seed grant help you to produce a bit more? This might allow you another publication or give you more preliminary data with which you can wow reviewers and give them confidence in funding your next, bigger project.

Yes, this is a lot of work, and you do have teaching responsibilities that take a chunk of time, but taking a little time now to plot out your research plan for the academic year will help keep you on track so that you don't end up in the spring feeling behind!

Resources:
Proposal Development Planning Resources - ORDE
Writing a Research Plan - Science