“We are pleased to inform you that your proposal was selected for funding.” That’s the sentence you were hoping for in an email, selection letter, or during a phone call. Finally, you can stop reading/listening, take the check to the bank, and go on with your life. Right? Well, not quite. Though for sure you should take a moment or two to appreciate your accomplishment, bask in the knowledge that you have joined the club of a select few, and thank everyone who has helped you to get here. If you have been following this column for a while, you will have relied on more helpers that you might have thought possible when you started out.

What happens after you are selected is as under appreciated as the time after the couple at the altars says “I do.” Cue the music, shower them with rose pedals and fade out. They live happily ever after. What else is there to tell? Anyone who has been lucky enough to make a long-term relationship work will tell you that this is only the beginning of a whole new journey. Just like at the wedding, you are just staring a relationship with your sponsor and not just for the duration of your current project. After all, you are hoping that this won’t be the last time you get selected. After the proposal is always also just before the next proposal. 

If this is your first funded proposal, this might come as a bit of a shock. Didn’t you just make it through this huge effort that took so much time away from the work you really want to do? Can’t you be done with this now? I’d love to tell you that it gets easier over time, that the effort will be less and you’ll get to just do your research. But I am afraid that, eventually, you simply adjust your expectations and realize this is the work and it does become more familiar as you establish your relationships with the people involved. 

The first step in that journey is to actually get the money you just were awarded. What’s involved is highly dependent on the sponsor of your project (the organization or individual who is sending you the money) and you and your home institution. If you are at a university in the United States, you will likely be working with your office of sponsored research or the equivalent and a program officer on the sponsor side. I can’t tell you the details here, but it is certain that there will be more paperwork to complete than you can imagine. There may be additional certifications or budget details than were requested in the original proposal. You may have to update some quotes you received when you built your initial budget and many more items. This can be very frustrating, but try to be as responsive as you can. Talk to your program officer if you have questions and nudge your own organization when necessary. If you are the Principal Investigator you are the hub of all activity. Don’t try to do everything yourself, but make sure that everything gets done. Be prepared that it takes longer than anticipated before you can start and keep everyone informed well before you are running into any critical time constraints.

Once you start your work, keep building on your relationship with your program officer. Of course you are delivering all required or requested reports on time, but also remember that there is a human at the receiving end of your reports. Tell them about presentations you are giving at conferences, send them copies of papers you are publishing. Did you get interviewed by a campus newspaper or a local radio station? Share this too. Give your sponsor the opportunity to show off the good work their good money enables. Most program officers want to expand the reach of their program and they are invested in your success. Don’t hesitate to see whether they can have a chat about how they think this is all going. Do they have any suggestions on where to take your research next? As scientists we are so trained to have the answers that we often miss out on the power of asking questions. Though asking questions and inviting help is the number one tool of building lasting relationships. Don’t miss out on this. 

Your relationship becomes even more important when it isn’t all good news that you have to share. If a particular analysis didn’t yield what was anticipated, hopefully, you are able to make a null-result mean something too. An ok null-result runs along these lines: “We looked in the kitchen and the car keys aren’t there. Let’s look in a different part of the house.” A less compelling result would be: “We were pressed for time when checking the kitchen, so while we did not find the keys, they could still be there.” Or worse: “Perhaps there were no car keys to begin with and what is a car anyway?” Try to make the results mean something and publish them too. At the very least, it lets other researchers learn from you. 

This entire article assumes that the end result of your proposals, sometimes called the “deliverable,” the thing that is expected of you by the sponsor, is a simple report of what you have accomplished. This means the success of the work is largely under your control. As long as you and your collaborators are able to spend the time you intended to spend on this, you are likely able to complete it. In the next article, I’ll talk about what to keep in mind when you are working with a much larger team and you may have to build an instrument or a facility to complete your project. Stay tuned.