Proposal Writing

Research is expensive. Why does it matter? That is what you need to convincingly address in your proposal (or application to various positions/jobs).

First of all, the experiment you are going to propose should matter. Think about what is the novelty, and what is the anticipated impact. If it does not matter, then try to come up with some other better experiments to do. Something that has been done, or something that many other people are already trying, is not novel. For example, if only 10 exoplanets have been found, it is appealing if you try to detect another 100. It sounds boring if you try to recover just another 1. Some observatories executive such kinds of observations for educative purposes. If you know such opportunities, it is OK to duplicate such experiments to pick up the skill. Competitive observatories do not accept proposals that try to duplicate what has been done.

If you are proposing to a competitive observatory, you are immediately competing with professors, even if you are just a first-year Master’s student. To have a successful career, you have to take this challenge and think about what will stand out in this competition. Then we think about how to make it stand out.

Now we assume that you have come up with a brilliant idea. But this would be just to people who are in your research field, if it is not just to yourself. On most occasions, the reviewers will not be familiar with your work or your research field. In addition, during the initial screening (to reject the majority of applications), they may not want to spend time reading your proposals/applications carefully. We need to learn to deal with such occasions.

The general guidelines are:

  • Start early. Usually, you need to polish your important proposals many times. And sometimes you need to sit on your draft for days or weeks before coming back to polish it with refreshed eyes/mind.
  • Use a positive tone.
  • Avoid jargon. If you do not have a sense of what is jargon, ask your friends who are not in the same research field to proofread your proposal. Also, do not use too many acronyms. For people who cannot remember or do not want to memorize the actual meanings of the acronyms, your proposal will become unreadable.
  • Spend time preparing nice figures.
    1. Anything appearing on your figure should be readable and understandable. The best is that people can pick up most of the ideas without reading into the caption.
    2. Use proper font sizes in the labels.
    3. One figure should convey only one or two ideas at most. If you have many points to make, create more figures.
    4. If you are making a contour plot, do not entangle the contours of multiple images. Usually, I would not consider presently more than 2 images in a contour plot.
    5. Do not have a big blank space in your figure. Take advantage of all of the space you can use.
    6. Try various color-codings or color-maps until your figure appears as a nice designed work. Avoid using the saturated default RGB if possible.
  • Make it smooth. The text and figures are not a stack of information. They should not just being there. Make you design. The information should be displaced in a way that people can pick up and remember the most important points smoothly. Place figures at the right page such that people will naturally see it when you are referring to it. Avoid letting people check back and forth your paragraphs. The logic should be one-way instead of a loop, or loops. A member in the review panel may have 30~60 proposals to read, grade, and compose feedback comments. Many people I know try to accomplish this task in 2 working days (i.e., 16 working hours) since it is very painful. In the initial screening, you only have their 5~10 minutes to read your 2 pages text plus 2 pages figures and tables.
  • Do not assign homework to the reviewer. If it requires checking some specific references to understand your proposal, your proposal is doomed. This is not what ideally should happen. But this is the reality, unfortunately. Nobody will ever read into any reference you provide. To some extent, the references are to acknowledge that you are familiar with the recent development. You should not attempt to educate the reviewers with the references.
  • Avoid typos and grammatical errors.
  • Tailor your proposal for the prospective readers. For example, if you know someone is going to review your proposal, then do not attack their work.
  • Make a balance between humbleness and confidence. Do not over-advertise your work. If you say your experiment will win a Nobel prize, the reaction of most of the readers will be “Oh yeah?”, and then start to challenge every single point you made. But also do not say something like “Our previous experiments suck”. Everybody knows that Asians tend to say so, but they never actually calibrate this culture difference.
  • Be honest. Do not propose what you are not going to do. When you already know that a specific assumption is unrealistic, or when you do not know whether or not a specific assumption is unrealistic, do not make it. You should be able to justify your assumption based on some physical principles or observational evidence, even if you do not have space to explicitly justify them. It is the best we can do is not a good excuse for making an unrealistic assumption. It sounds bad to some of us. Do not propose the analyses that you already know is infeasible. It can happen that you only know your experiment is infeasible during the preparation of your proposal. In this case, terminate the project. Be very careful when you are proposing an experiment that you are not certain about whether or not they are feasible or relevant. Sometimes you do not actually know the feasibility before you receive the data (e.g., when you try to propose the first blind search for exoplanets). Some of such experiments are in the high-risk high-reward category. But you should at least have some justifiable ideas in mind why it might be feasible. It is OK to try it, perhaps, starting from a de-scoped pilot study. Be honest to yourself. Do not pretend that you do not yet know whether or not it will work out when you are already convinced that it is not going to work.

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