Five common GRFP mistakes
If your in the final throws of preparing your GRFP proposal, check your draft against these 5 common mistakes to help you submit a stronger proposal that stands out from the stack.
Personal statement: Mistake #1 - The first sentence of your personal statement is cringe. “I’ve been fascinated by XX since I was a child” or “Growing up I found a passion for XX”. Cringe times infinity. I cannot tell you how many proposals start with a boring, eye-roll inducing cliche. As a reviewer, I don’t want to hear about cute little baby you. I want to hear about the professionally ready, mature, self-aware you that is ready to take on the world and solve some of the biggest, baddest, boldest problems facing science and society. That first sentence has to have bang. It has to scream ‘put this proposal on the top of the stack’. Do this instead: Start with a fascinating question, observation, or problem. Something like: “According to the Texas Department of Education I should have been a high-school dropout. A statistic. Instead I forged a career path that was so unknown to me, or anyone around me, that I’m still figuring out the unwritten rules.” Bam. Or for a slightly less in-your-face tone: “How do we prepare the next generation of scientists for careers that don’t yet exist for global economies and natural ecosystems that may look very different than they do today? Solving this challenge will require a new set of rules. And players. Especially with perspectives that deviate from the norm.” It’s awkward writing about yourself, we know, we can read that awkwardness on the page. As a reviewer, however, it’s easy to differentiate the students who are self-aware from those who are not. And it’s the personal statement that’s a dead giveaway.
Personal statement: Mistake #2 - Talking about your accomplishments in high school. Unless you have a really good reason to or its a part of your evolution as a scientist, talking about what you did in high school comes off as if you spent your time in college doing nothing. Instead: we want to hear about how you have made a difference, or overcame some obstacle, arrived at some interesting question/observation/aha moment. Reviewers are scientists too and appreciate a good ‘aha moment’. We want to see your arc or trajectory as a scientist and we want to see that it’s an upward one. Focusing on high school puts that trajectory on the down slope.
Research statement: Mistake #3 - Missing the context of your research question. There are so many ways to get your research statement wrong. The most common one is leaving out the context of your research question. This is usually because you failed to address the ‘why should we care about this [protein, species, soil microbe, insert super niche topic here] thing’. Instead: get us excited about the topic. I’ve seen this done well even about obscure topics and each time the writer has found some nugget of connection between study system and something fascinating that inspires awe and wonder. You want your reader to wish they had thought of the idea. They should be so excited that they too will want to study the (e.g.) microbes that colonize pigeon poop.
Research statement: Mistake #4 - You fail to demonstrate feasibility and how your work makes the world a better place. This is one of the easier mistakes to correct because feasibility can be demonstrated by showing your understanding of logistics. Show us your cards. How will you achieve this? A lot of proposals get tanked because it doesn’t explain how …how the experiments will distinguish some new pattern/process, how access/permits to field sites will be obtained, how outreach programs will be conducted. The proposals that do this, easily rise to the top.
Letter of recommendations: Mistake #5 - Your letter writers are crap. This is a hard one to fix for a few reasons (but see below). Usually this happens because either a) you’ve come to the realization that you want to pursue a STEM career too late in your undergraduate career and therefore do not have strong mentors to ask to write letters; b) you couldn’t find opportunities because your institution, family, or network aren’t in a position to facilitate access to these opportunities (because access to these are obvs dependent on socio-economic factors); or c) a little bit of tough love here but maybe you aren’t as stellar as you believe and your past interactions with faculty didn’t inspire a strong letter (or, more likely, your letter writers were asked too late, or the letter writer simply wasn’t the right person, or the letter writer was overstretched, or simply a terrible person who shouldn’t be mentoring students). Reviewers don’t fault you entirely for this, dear applicant, but we do make mental notes of this in the context of the rest of your application. For example, if I see you studied at an under-sourced university in an EPSCoR state…I make a note of this. The reality is: you are competing with students from the most elite universities in the nation. Your proposal has to stand out in other ways if you think your letters won’t be as strong as you’d like. Another solution: when you email your letter writers, give them a bullet point of topics to write about (and then give different topics to your other letter writers) so that, together, these letters complement each other instead of simply listing the same stuff from your resume. Don’t panic. Not having strong letters isn’t going to kill your application.
Bonus Mistake #6: Overly using GenAI. GenAI is ubiquitous. But it has it’s own writing style and voice that is noticeable for those who know what to look for, even if you scrub your text. The scary problem with GenAI is that it erodes credibility for everyone, making us constantly question what is and isn’t generated by AI. If your application reads in a weird tone that no one uses in real life…it’s a red flag, even if you’re the next Ernest Hemingway or Isabela Allende. Be careful if you’re using GenAI to write your proposal. Instead write the full draft on your own, and if you’re gonna use it, limit it to grammar or for smoothing over the odd sentence you just can’t get out of your head. Use it as a tool not a teacher.
Good luck! And repost if you found any of this useful (I’ll use these metrics as benchmarks to decide whether to continue this Big Red Pen experiment).