Proposal reviews of all types do not require in-person visits, instead the reviews are conducted remotely and engagement over the course of the review happens virtually. All proposals on behalf of the University of New Mexico Main and Branch campuses receive a review prior to sponsor-imposed deadlines that ensures compliance with 2 CFR 200 Uniform Guidance, Federal Acquisition Regulations, University policy, and sponsor proposal instructions.Īs a Core Office, OSP is committed to ensuring timely and accurate reviews of proposal components, while reducing administrative burden on Principal Investigators. The Office of Sponsored Projects (OSP) Proposal Team uses an appointment customer service model to provide personalized, dedicated proposal reviews, and to ensure accurate and timely submissions. Of course, these are not the same as proposal-writing, but the experience will serve you well.Proposal Review - The UNM Way Office of Sponsored Projects Proposal Team Similarly, getting good at writing a research statement (for a job application or a fellowship application) is a useful skill that has some overlap at formulating and writing grant proposals. Learn as much as you can from that process, as some of those lessons will carry over to help you write better grant proposals. Offer to give feedback to your fellow students on their quals proposals. Spend time on your quals proposal and try to make it outstanding. Quals proposals are another great form of practice at this sort of thing they require some similar skills. After you read the proposals, you can ask your advisor for his/her own assessment of the proposal, and even ask to see the reviews of those submissions from review panel, compare to your own assessment, and use this feedback to improve your knowledge. Maybe they can outline a piece of it and you can try writing a draft of a section.Īlso, you can ask to see copies of past proposals they've submitted (both funded and unfunded). Maybe you can read a draft and offer comments. In particular, ask them if you can be involved with the next grant proposal they write. The number-one way: talk to your advisor/PI and ask them. However, there are other ways to get experience with the grant proposal process. You can't get experience serving on a grant proposal review panel as a grad student. This isn't quite the same as reviewing proposals yourself, but it could still give you valuable experience with how grant applications work. They could also ask collaborators whether they had any proposals they would be willing to share. They could share their own proposals, and perhaps even reviews of those proposals or drafts of upcoming proposals. Instead, I'd recommend asking your advisor to see the other side of the process. I can't speak for other fields, but I'm skeptical that grad students ever play a major role in reviewing proposals. Overall, in pure math grad students basically never review grant proposals. Furthermore, faculty are not allowed to show proposals they have been asked to review to their students (it may sometimes happen, but it's breaking explicit rules regarding confidentiality). The NSF is highly unlikely to ask a grad student to review proposals (it might theoretically be possible for a brilliant student who is almost done with their Ph.D., but I've never heard of it happening). Reviewing grant proposals as a student is tricky, at least in some fields.