Grant writing excellence begins in a place few researchers expect—and many try to avoid—the realm of bad ideas and feelings of going nowhere. Dr. Andee Kaplan, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at CSU, shares her map through the messy middle of proposal writing. Through her recent accomplishments, we learn how writing colleagues, dogged persistence, and research purpose create a path to grant-writing success.
In 2024, Andee was awarded not one but two prestigious NSF grants—including the coveted NSF CAREER—to fund her work on developing computational tools to advance an issue in historical data recording called record linkage. She was gracious enough to share her experience and offer some advice with us in hopes of inspiring others to embark on extensive and intimidating grant projects of their own.
In order to write these two massive grant proposals, Andee fully embraced the concept of the CSU Writes mantra to just show up and write:
“I attended every CSU Writes meeting I could to develop a regular writing practice. Even the sessions where I was frustrated and felt that my writing was going nowhere were important to my process. In order to make the progress I needed to; it was important that I worked through the bad ideas first. This regular writing allowed me to know that there would be more time very soon that I could count on to move the proposals forward.”
In terms of grant writing in general, Andee describes her application to both grants simultaneously as “hedging my bets,” and simply feels lucky to have not needed to fall back on one if the other failed. Her advice to other grant writers is to just do it: “Start early! Also, find your circle of people to provide feedback.”
According to Andee, the greatest reward of this endeavor was less about winning the awards, but more so for having reached her goal of finishing the proposals and having a product she is proud to have others read. Ultimately, Andee says that writing these proposals has provided a roadmap and clarity toward her future path: “I’m mostly inspired to keep moving forward by the work itself. I would be working on these problems even if the grants were unfunded, but it’s wonderful to be able to pay my students to collaborate on this research.”