Grant recommendations

A teacher friend casually asked me recently what it takes to submit a grant to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for research or a project. When I stopped laughing, I reflected on the process and wrote this blog.

Ideally, you would be affiliated with an educational organization like a college professor. I worked on previous grants with the Challenger Center and the Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. They did a lot of the paperwork, so I was ignorant of all the forms involved.

Since I am NOT affiliated with an educational organization, I started looking for other options. The NSF encourages small businesses to participate and seek women-owned businesses. I started researching what it takes to create a business in Georgia. Ads galore offered to create a business for me for hundreds of dollars. I dug further and found I could submit all the forms online to the Georgia Government. Hence, Turner Rogue Entertainment, LLC was born in the summer of 2022. I wanted Rogue Entertainment, but someone had already registered a business under that name years ago. They were no longer using it, but it was still unavailable.

I have a business. Step one completed. Back to the NSF. What are your Sam.gov and IRS numbers? OK. Another hoop to jump through presents itself. Days of paperwork later, I am approved as a government contractor. It is an accidental side benefit of wanting to submit for an NSF grant. You have to have this first. The IRS number is another form to fill out, the simplest of any processes. Congratulations, I now have an EIN or a business tax number.

Back to NSF. I am approved as an acceptable organization to submit for a grant. Party! Celebrate! Wait, what? Principal Investigator? AOS? What are all these acronyms?

I am the most logical for the principal investigator (PI). After all, I have experience in technical writing and data analysis. That Ph.D. statistics class information will finally be used. Submit documentation, and days later, the company has a PI. Am I the AOS as president of the company? Cool. I sift through the website to find where the AOS gives the PI permission to access any proposals associated with the company. Here we go, Fall of 2022.

I save the 189-page document on how to apply for a grant. Highlight all the categories and create a document with all the information. Thirty-six pages later, I am ready to go and submit with minutes to spare on the deadline. It was a challenge. I downloaded it from google docs and saved it into a folder. My laptop zipped everything, so I extracted it. I uploaded the information. Two days later, I received an email that my proposal application was returned because it needed to be completed. Only some of the files in the folder were uploaded. I had no way of seeing it on the form.

A friend who had won several NSF grants said it would be remarkable to win a grant the first time applying. I already counted it as a win. Look how far I have come in just a few months. Another friend said I may be the most stubborn person he has ever met. I prefer to think of it as a ninja level of persistence. The first grant did not accomplish my main goals anyway. It was a means to an end. I went back through the hundreds of funding opportunities on the NSF website. One is an ideal fit!

I adjusted all my previous information and separated each section into a doc for each part. That way, I downloaded one as a pdf and then uploaded one at a time into each slot on the website. It took over six hours to apply because I went carefully through the process to be sure each place had the correct document. Having already conducted the literature review and a significant part of the required information, adjusting the proposal took about twenty hours. It was not turned down as much as it was weak in the research portion of the application. I was asked to boost it up and resubmit in 2024. I have successfully won grants when I partnered with universities. This is my first year to attempt to step out on my own. I advise you to find a gap in the literature review and create research that fills in that gap.

I advise anyone wanting to write an NSF proposal to allow yourself a lot of time. It is a lengthy process. More advice is to find the funding project before spending too much time writing the project. Please do have a general idea of what you want to do. However, the funding project will have specific parameters you need to meet. You must also affiliate with an organization to save months of paperwork unless you want to own your business and be a government contractor.

Contact me if you want to collaborate on chasing a National Science Foundation grant. I have a woman-owned LLC already in Georgia and am a certified Primary Investigator with the NSF. I am also a SAM.gov-certified government contractor so I can chase government contracts for any branch of the USA government.