teaching-phd-skills

Why this exists

Writing a full proposal is not a course assignment — it is a months-long effort with a real deadline attached to somebody’s salary. But the two fragments that decide most proposals are each about a page, and both are learnable in isolation. The project summary is what a programme officer reads to decide which panel sees it. Broader impacts is the section engineers routinely treat as an afterthought and reviewers routinely score hardest, because a vague broader impacts section is the clearest available signal that the rest was written in a hurry.

External material

The NSF PAPPG — Chapter II for what the project summary must contain and the Intellectual Merit / Broader Impacts headings it requires. A live DOE funding opportunity announcement if your work is DOE-aligned, since the format differs.

Governing part

None.

The mechanic

Work against a real, currently-open call. Named, with its deadline. A generic proposal teaches nothing, because every constraint that makes proposal writing hard comes from the call.

1. Project summary to the call’s actual page limit, with the headings the call requires. The limit is the exercise.
2. Broader impacts naming three things: a specific activity, a specific audience, and how you would know it worked. “Will broaden participation” fails all three. “Two REU students recruited through the UTA McNair programme, each producing a conference poster, tracked to graduate school application” passes.

Your gap statement from Literature review and gap-finding is the raw material for the intellectual merit paragraph. If it does not fit, the gap was not specific enough — go back to it.

Deliverable

PDF, within the call’s stated page limits.

Competency check

• A real call is named, with its deadline
• Within the stated page limit — verified, not estimated
• Required headings present exactly as the call words them
• Broader impacts names an activity, an audience, and a measure
• Intellectual merit traceable to the Literature review and gap-finding gap statement

Turning it in

This replaces your writing entry for the week you do it. Submit it to that week’s WW assignment in Canvas — the same one you would have submitted anyway. It is not an extra piece of work on top of the log.

• In the text box: which call, and what you had to cut to fit the limit.
• You hand in: A PDF within the call’s stated page limit: project summary under the headings the call requires, and a broader-impacts section naming an activity, an audience, and how you would measure it

You do not submit anything to the milestone yet. When all four skills in M6 are done, submit the M6 — Stewardship assignment, which is just an index saying which week each one went in.

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