Putting the Pieces in Place
Once you've arrived at a coherent set of research questions, it's time to put the pieces in place.
Use your contacts to solicit feedback on draft journal articles, proceedings, or proposals. Consider traveling to meet with agency program officers, talking with your program officer about your research topic, or establishing and e-mail correspondence with them. You should be prepared with a one- to two-page summary of the research idea and be open for feedback.
An innovative collaboration or partnership?
Do your research interests cut across disciplinary boundaries? Could collaborating with other areas strengthen your research program and its chances of getting funded? This is especially useful for tenured or senior faculty; dependence on such collaborations could be risky for new researchers if the collaboration suddenly ends or takes a different direction.
Perhaps a partnership with industry or relationships with entrepreneurs or venture capitalists would be appropriate.
Develop conversations for relatedness: Identify who is participating. Identify what people do and what are their strengths. Consider common interests and potential synergies. Identify what will have made it worth your while for you to be in this discussion.
Develop conversations for possibility: Identify what can be gained from the collaboration and any objectives that can be stated. Identify practical strategies to enhance communication among the group(s). Identify possible sustainable funding to support the collaboration.
Develop conversations for action: Synthesize the conversations for relatedness and possibility (vision statement). Create an action plan. Create a mission goal(s) and objectives. Generate major activities or strategies of the collaboration. Identify potential sources of funding. Organize a steering committee for structure, operating plan, and financing to achieve objectives. Build ownership and trust at all levels. Monitor processes, evaluation, and feedback for continuous improvement.
Find funding opportunities for research development
UWM offers several internal programs directed toward junior faculty for establishing their research programs. In addition, major funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, offer competitive funding awards to help promising young researchers establish their research agendas or help established researchers expand their research enterprises. The National Endowment for the Humanities offers fellowships, summer stipends, summer institutes and seminars, and collaborative research opportunities.
Develop an action plan
Once you've narrowed your research focus, it's time to put a structured plan in place to help meet your short- and long-term goals.
Decide on a research methodology that's most appropriate for your inquiry. Critically examine previous approaches, questioning generality, practicality, and validation.
Frame long-term questions to be answered. Use short-term objectives to subdivide research into manageable pieces. Setting unrealistic goals can be frustrating and disheartening.
It may be helpful to track your progress by making a chart. List, for each project/publication, your collaborators, what needs to get done, where you intend to submit it, an anticipated submission date, and then a status column.
Involve your students, both graduate and undergraduate. Allow students the opportunity to initiate inquiry and respond to your research questions.
Re-examine your research at regular intervals (yearly, start of summer) to ensure progress towards long-term questions.
Establish a reading group with your colleagues or students. Keep a research notebook where you can jot down ideas for later consideration. Go back and look at your entries.
Teach a graduate seminar in your area of interest; teaching is a learning experience.
Attend workshops, especially those with work-in-progress presentations.
Participate in grant evaluation panels and program committees.
Identify funding sources for developed proposals
It's important for researchers to seek external support for their activities.
Research Initiatives and Development in the Graduate School is an important resource for identifying potential funders. The Funding Opportunities section of this Web site has many links to extramural, internal, and limited-submission funding sources, as well as information on grant alert e-mail services and grantwriting support.
Don't get frustrated if your proposals are not funded—in some cases you can revise and re-submit proposals after receiving reviewer and panel comments.
Get published
Getting grants can lead to salary support, research assistants, and the tools you need to put together your research projects. Complete the research and publish the results. Publications and preliinary data can increase your chances of grant awards.
Look at what you have been doing in the past few years. Perhaps you have small findings that can be published as short reports or research notes. Perhaps they were collected during your dissertation research, or pieces of preliminary research you've done while trying to figure out your long-term goals.
Build on what you have already done
If you have presented papers at a conference, prepare them for submission to journals. You've already done the work of thinking, organizing, writing, and have hopefully gotten quality feedback. Don't waste that investment; complete the project before you start something new.