One Way to Plan a Proposal

Although my current postdoc doesn't end for about 9 months, it's high time to be looking for the next step. Among other options that I'm pursuing, I decided to apply to NASA's Postdoctoral Program (NPP). This program is a competitive opportunity for scientists to seek funding to execute a proposed research plan at a NASA center, advised by a NASA scientist.

I can't really claim to give much in the way of advice for the NPP, seeing as how this is the first time I've applied, and I won't even know if I'm successful for a few months. Nonetheless, I will share my experiences putting together, in a 2-day sprint, an outline plan for the proposal, because I personally found it an illuminating experience.

To understand why this experience was so illuminating for me, we have to wind back the clock. I'm a senior in undergrad, and I'm about to present at my first science conference. My poster describes preliminary results from the first research project that I ever designed, and I'm excited to talk with other scientist about the results. I like the idea so much that I toy around with it again and again in later years. In a graduate course where I'm asked to write a research proposal, I write one that builds off of that original project. When I first explored applying to the NPP about 2.5 years ago, I likewise pitched a related proposal to a potential advisor. With each iteration, my ideas matured somewhat, but--at least from my perspective now--they weren't yet mature.

Thus, as I sat down to outline a new NPP proposal, I was struck with all sorts of intimidation and self-doubt, which is silly. Everyone starts at the same place with a proposal: a germ of an idea. There's always a mountain to climb before the proposal will be mature. This time, I determined to actually climb that mountain properly. Without much more than intuition to guide me, these are the basic steps that I used, and I found them to work quite well:

1. Germ of an idea. This could be almost anything, from an interesting geologic site to a poorly understood geologic feature to a technique. In my case, it was a technique combined with a category of geologic feature.
2. Honestly identify the strengths and weaknesses of the idea. Historically, this had been the hardest part of the process. Perhaps because the incipient project was effectively my "firstborn" research idea, I had a hard time seeing its weaknesses. To compound matters, just like any other scientist, I have biases, and one of mine is that I tend to get excited by new or refined techniques and sometimes lose focus on the end goal: expanding our scientific understanding. That bias caused me to focus, in the past, primarily on the methodological strengths. Nonetheless, this time, I managed to significantly overcome both of these hurdles and soberly identify the strengths and weaknesses of the idea. Two notable weaknesses were: (1) some points of excessive similarity to other published papers (by other scientists), and (2) a technique that answered a question that had already been answered in the literature, at least somewhat. Two  notable strengths were: (1) the technique was significantly more refined than what had been used in Martian science before, and could therefore yield higher-quality results, and (2) the project was framed with an appreciation of some often overlooked, or trivialized, aspects that could prove important in the interpretation of the data.
3. Confront the weaknesses; build on the strengths, and add to them; consult the literature. This is where the process becomes less linear. In practice, I bounced between each of these components frequently, but I can distill some of the results now, in retrospect. One way that I confronted the excessive similarity to other projects was by identifying weaknesses in those projects and avoiding those weaknesses in my plan. Whereas other projects had taken a narrow approach of looking at one class of geologic features or scattered sites, I modified my plan to look at the entire assemblage of related geologic features across an entire region. If you've ever spent much time as a student in geology, you've certainly heard a professor lecture about the importance of geologic maps. In a nutshell, making a map forces one to understand the entire region as a whole. It leaves no room, or at least much less room, for cherry-picking (even subconsciously) spatial relationships or trends that serve a particular conclusion. In essence, you have to make sense of all of nature's unconstrained messiness. The upshot is that, in doing so, you often discover challenges to ideas formed on the basis of a few scattered sites or very focused observations of a subclass of features, and form new ideas that are at least somewhat more robust. One way that I built on a strength was detailing the advantages that my refined technique offered over previous methods and identifying meaningful scientific questions that were much better answered precisely because of those advantages. The match was so good that, in the end, the new plan reads as though the technique had been chosen to answer those questions rather than that the technique dictated the project. Of course, that end result is as it should be. I also added strength to the paper by using the literature to expand and deepen my understanding of the region that I wanted to investigate and of the assemblage of features that I might find there.
4. Iterate Step 3! If this weren't clear already, I revisited different components of Step 3 again and again, each time further refining the project plan and at least once nearly starting over from scratch. Proverbial wads of paper littering the ground is a necessary price for a mature plan!

So, there you are. That's more or less how my project, first conceived in undergrad, has at long last matured. Although there is surely more maturing yet to be done, even before the project itself starts (if it gets funded), I think it's fair to say that my firstborn may be a "late bloomer", but it is