The correct longer title should include “while teaching a course for the first time, submitting a paper, applying for a green card, and dealing with chronic and acute health issues,” but the shorter one is more catchy and Google friendly!
I woke up to my mentor’s email in Jan 2nd who forwarded me an email about an NCI webinar on a “New NCI Early K99 Funding Program,” and the webinar was happening in a few hours. I got very excited and checked the FOA and was astounded to find that it was only announced on Dec 20th! I attended that webinar, and it turned out to exactly match my background and career goals: NCI wants to keep data scientists in cancer research, and their statistics show that they don’t stay because 4-year window (post Ph.D. eligibility window for the regular K99) is too much for them in an era of starving-for-data-scientists industry. So to motivate them, they started a focused K99 with 2-year eligibility window, i.e., “Early K99” with three tracks: data science, cancer control science, and other sciences. Each university can have one candidate per track, so the first step was to make sure that I am the OSU candidate. I had the first-mover advantage, and after a week of follow-ups, I officially became the OSU’s candidate in data science for NCI Early K99.
I started to work on the proposal right away!
OK, the truth is I had been thinking about submitting a K99 for a year, but I had a dilemma: On one hand, I wanted to keep my focus on cancer, on the other hand, NCI has not known to be well-receiving of the computational applications. So, I had been looking into other institutes, and the most related one was NHGRI, which is not an exact fit to what I’m doing, and I had many disadvantages compared to those with genetics background. On the methods side I have been reading about causality and attending lectures and watching courses about it for 10 months and I had the big picture of the field, and I wanted to apply causality to some interesting cancer applications. I have been talking about that with my mentors and other faculty members in the OSU campus and reading the relevant literature, but still, I did not have a definite problem in mind.
Why am I talking about these? Because I want to emphasize that contrary to my click-bait title, “IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO PROPERLY WRITE AN EARLY K99 IN TWO MONTHS, UNLESS YOU HAD PREPARED THE GROUND.” I had once in a lifetime chance of applying for Early K99, and I was partially ready for it and as Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” For example, I had worked with university officials to get a PI status and an eRACommons account six months ago which are necessary for this award.
Here, I will provide you with some tips based on my experience in the order of importance to myself. This process was like an intense exercise for me, I did a few weeks warm up, five weeks of extraordinary work and have been cooling down over the past week. You will see the theme here.
Health
1- Nothing is more important than your health, know your mind and body limits. I had to do this in two months because the FOA was announced late and at the next deadline I will be out of the two-years eligibility window.
2- Sitting for 12 hours a day will kill you. Stand, walk around the room, use any equipment that you can in home or office to work out. I was holding dumbbells while I was walking around the apartment and thinking. I was exercising for 15 - 30 minutes during the first month but none for the second one because literally, I did not have the time for it. Again, this is not healthy and recommended.
3- For writing the science part, you need your sharpest self. Sleep is the price to pay, but I could not sleep because I always was thinking about the proposal and if I could I automatically was waking up after a few hours. So my suggestion is to do the science first (other reasons below) because the beginning of this effort is less stressful and you can sleep better.
4- Take frequent naps if you can. It will refresh your mind and body.
5- Limit your interaction with others to avoid diseases, you can’t afford a cold during this. In my class, whenever I was hearing a student sneeze, I was avoiding that part of the room for the rest of the session :)
6- You know your body better than anyone, treat it well to help you! Take supplements, vitamin C, or anything that will boost your immune system. Again, two months is too short for catching a cold.
7- Reduce your calory intake. Since you don’t move, this is the only way for keeping a steady weight. I was having breakfasts late at 9 am and dinners early at 5 pm. This way I was lighter and sharper at early morning and late nights.
Family
8- Discuss the situation clearly with your immediate family and excuse yourself from any event that you can. Keep them updated as you go.
9- Don’t forget to compensate when you are done :)
Time Management
To be able to dedicate almost all of your time to proposal writing, you need to keep your house in order first and handle all other responsibilities in advance to clear your mind.
10- During the first two weeks, I spent a lot of time on the course that I’m teaching and prepared most of the material for the semester, and that helped me a lot to stay focus on the proposal closer to the deadline. I also submitted a paper to ICML (deadline of Jan 23rd), and together these two ate up my first three weeks, but I was free to focus after that.
11- Discuss the situation with all of your bosses (if you have multiple of them like me) as soon as possible. If they are on board they may help or at least they won’t cause you trouble.
12- Excuse from attending any meeting or working on any project. If it is not possible to stall a project, ask your mentor or lab mates to do you a favor and substitute you in those efforts.
13- If you can save time by working from home, do that. I stayed home as far as I could to save one hour of driving time every day.
14- If there is a meeting that you have to attend, try to participate online. Video calls and desktop sharing are enough for almost all scientific meetings.
15- Work backward by estimating the number of hours that you need for the grant and then allocate that to each week and keep track of your process. I had an unsuccessful attempt at writing an NSF grant a few months ago, and that gave me a real time-estimate. I thought that 100 hours for the science part and 100 hours for the non-science part should be enough and I was right.
16- To do so, I was following Cal Newport’s advice in his book “Deep Work” on having a “board of lead measure” where I kept tally of the hours that I was working on the award. Below is a picture of my scoreboard. As you see, I spent 109 hours on science mostly during the first three weeks and 115 hours on other parts of the application.
17- As you get close to the submission deadline, working during the “working hours” will almost become impossible. You will be emailing and calling people from 9 am - 5 pm during the last week, and you won’t work on anything else. So, I was working on different parts of the grant in 5 - 9 am and 6 pm onward. Coffee and loud white noise were companions of mine through these extended hours.
Program Officer
OK, going to the award itself. My stupidest mistake was not to communicate with my PO efficiently, so I’m putting it first. This award was new, and in four different issues we had disagreements in the OSU side about what is right or wrong to do, and we wasted time discussing in long emails what I could have asked my PO in a short email. I don’t know what my problem was, maybe I was thinking that a person with a Ph.D. in Biochemistry is not sitting there to answer my formatting questions and I should figure this out from the instructions myself. But I was absolutely wrong, the POs are well-aware of every detail of the FOA and submission procedure, and they are very very responsive, and most importantly, they have the final say. Below is the list of topics that my PO clarified for me:
18- Biosketches are necessary for all mentors and recommended for all LOS writers.
19- There is an NCI salary cap for this grant and your institute salary cap for postdocs. You will get the minimum of the two, but if the restriction is from your institute, it is your job to negotiate for the raise before finalizing your budget.
20- The 12 pages of candidate and research will be broken down at the time of submission, and specific aims page goes in between of those, so you should not switch from candidate to research at the middle of a page.
Submission
21- OSU has its own interface to the Grants.gov, so I did not directly interact with government’s submission website. After the fact, I noticed that such an interface is handy because if you use the standard system, it takes a while (in my case two days) to see if your submission had errors or not. But OSU’s system readily tells you the errors and warnings which is very helpful.
22- The final submission is done by a university official, they have different names in different universities. At OSU they are called Sponsored Program Officer (SPO). Find the SPO of your department contact them soon. It is good to know if they had previous experience with NIH and K awards.
Science Part
23- If you are a data scientist, you probably have a bag of cool methods, your job is to find a really cool application. That takes time. I have been talking with my mentors about my ideas about methods that I proposed in K99 for a year now, it didn’t happen overnight.
24- Do this as fast as possible. This is actually the first step and literally the most significant bottleneck. Everyone will need your “specific aims” page even to pay attention to your requests.
25- Again the science part is intellectually demanding, so reserve the time after your sleep for science and defend it like crazy.
26- Have a section on significance, one on innovation and then a research strategy which has a subsection for each aim.
27- At the end, similar to NSF-grants I added a section about validation and evaluation.
28- Have a final paragraph explaining what you had in your proposal and link back to your specific aims.
29- In specific aims page and the final paragraph weave in phrases from the mission of NCI and its data science sections.
Background and Career Development
30- I did not have any idea how to write this. I was fortunate to have two samples of failed K99 attempts from my friends which helped me a lot.
31- Here are my background section’s subsections:
- Previous training: Who am I? How did I get into data science?
- The turning point: Why I got into cancer study?
- Ongoing training: What have I been doing during my postdoc?
- Forging a career path: How did I come up with the proposed project?
32- Here are my career development section’s subsections:
- Collaboration and progress evaluation
- Enhancing my research skill (formal coursework, skill improvement, seminars, online courses)
- Writing, presentation, grantsmanship, and critical assessment skills
- Supervisory, mentoring and teaching skills
- Leadership and laboratory management
- Transition to independence
Mentoring Plan
33- The mentoring plan should mirror the career development plan.
34- If you have multiple mentors, they should coordinate in writing this document.
35- Remember, this is not a recommendation letter! This is about your weaknesses and the plan to improve you in those areas.
36- Your mentors should attest that the work is yours to take with you and they will fully support you during the job search.
Feedbacks
37- Early on, contact as many mentors, friends, and lab mates individually and ask them when they will be available to read your proposal and give you feedback.
38- I’ve got feedback from ~12 people and even if any of them have fixed only 10 mistakes of mine, that amounts to 120 dumb mistakes corrected.
Other Letters and Documents
39- Letter of intent 40- Nomination letter 41- Institutional commitment 42- Letter of support from collaborators 43- Facilities and resources 44- Equipment 45- Biosketches 46- Current and Pending support 47- Key personnel 48- Reference letters 49- Responsible Conduct of Research & Research Ethics 50- Description of institution and environment
Budget
51- The NIH cap for this award is the very competitive $100,000.
52- Other than salary and the fringe benefit there are “Other Costs” which constitutes travels, publications, and tuition with the $30,000 cap.
53- Indirect cost rate is 8% computed using all budgeted things excluding tuition.
54- You should only budget for the mentoring (K99) phase in detail and put the cap for three years of the R00 phase which is $249,000.
Formatting
55- NSF-accustomed folks were critical of my .5 margin, but 11 Arial and .5 margin is NIH’s standard.
56- Break the wall of text by underlines, bold faces, tables, and figures.
57- Use footnote style citation to save space.
Points for non-native English speakers
58- Do not be afraid to copy-paste proper sentences from the references. This helped me especially in the biology parts.
59- The translate.google.com and thesaurus.com are your friends.
60- Separate the writing mode from editing mode.
Cooldown
Congratulations, you did it! Now that you have submitted your first ever grant, you need a week to cool down.
61- Send out thank you notes to whoever helped you.
62- Cut down the coffee, start exercising lightly, pay the late bills, fill out the tax return, grade the midterm exam, call your family, and sleep.
63- Re-think the meaning of life to avoid PADD (post-application deadline depression)!
And that is it!
P.S. Wait a second, do you think you are done?! Wrong! The review process begins in three months, and you have till then to update your resume with new papers that you have published. So get back to your current research from where you left and publish as fast and as much as you can!