How To Get Honest and Useful Feedback On Your NIH Specific Aims Page
So you have a completed draft of your Specific Aims page, and you’re feeling accomplished, right?
You should be. Don’t be ashamed to celebrate here. You just made a major step toward completing your R01!
But don’t celebrate too long, because there’s still plenty of work to be done. Remember, this is your draft…not the finished product.
You still have a few more steps before you finalize your aims page.
Refine Your Aims With Feedback
Receiving feedback is vital before moving forward because—as I’ve said hundreds of times—your specific aims page is the most important page of your R01. Why?
It’s the one page that all your reviewers will read as a way to orient them to your grant proposal. (Only your assigned reviewers will read your full application in detail)
It’s a high-level overview of your entire project. Which means that it’s useful to orient your reviewers to your proposal…and it’s useful for you to use as a conceptual blueprint for the rest of your application.
That’s why I stress the need for others to get their eyes on your draft pretty early on, so you can learn where you hit the mark and where you may be falling short and not making a compelling case.
But you can’t let just anyone look over your draft. Being selective with who views your aims page will help you avoid even more stress and discouragement than you may already feel while completing your application.
Asking the wrong person to take a look at your grant at the wrong time in the development process can mean getting overly discouraging feedback and—on rarer occasions—having your research idea scooped.
The bottom line is that you need to seek out people you trust who will care for your early ideas by nurturing and encouraging them rather than crapping all over them or co-opting them.
Who are these trusted people? And how do you find them?
Let’s talk about it.
Finding The Right Sources For Feedback
After completing a rough conceptual draft of your aims page, your first source of feedback should come from potential co-investigators, colleagues, and mentors.
Let’s go back to the topic of trust for a moment. Within this group you should have a handful of people who fall within your professional circle of trust. You’ve spent time developing the relationship, understanding each other’s scientific goals, and are there to support one another—these are the folks who can give you honest and useful feedback at the very early stages of idea development. In other words, these are people who can help nurture this idea so that it can grow into its full potential—not people who’ll squash your idea before it has a chance to grow.
So asking for feedback from them should be a no-brainer, if you’ve been able to establish that trust.
Your next source of useful feedback is your potential NIH Program Officer. You’ll want to reach out to them once you’re more clear on your research direction and you’re making sure it’s aligned with the mission and priorities of your target funding institute or center.
How To Get Good Feedback
To receive helpful feedback, you have to understand why you need feedback and what kind of feedback you need.
You’re in the early stages of your R01, so the most efficient way to proceed is to seek feedback on the high-level concept of your research idea.
This focus helps to establish confidence that you’ve made a solid argument for the significance and impact of your research and that your general approach to filling the gap in knowledge is sound.
Knowing this, it’s now your job to set the expectation for your co-investigators and colleagues that you need feedback from a conceptual perspective. You want them to focus on your idea: the significance, objectives, and aims.
If you don’t give them any guidance on what sort of feedback you’re looking for, you may get comments on aspects of your aims page that are unnecessary at this stage, like grammar and spelling (honestly, at this stage who cares?).
How To Use The Feedback
This early-stage feedback is designed to help refine your idea today instead of getting so far into the process that knowing your idea has some serious issues completely derails your motivation for starting from step one.
Take what you learned from the feedback and your self-assessment and tinker with your idea until you’re confident and excited to complete your application.
I do want you to remember this: The feedback you get is information you can use to make the best decision for your R01. You collect the feedback and analyze that information in the context of your own expertise to make a decision that best serves your research goals.
To put it simply, you are the decider. You make the final decision about what expert input you will implement into your grant application.
Your Aims Page Is Your Blueprint
After completing your draft, receiving expert and trusted feedback, and making the adjustments to your aims page, you now have a 30,000-foot view of your project. You can clearly see a solid argument for the significance and impact of your research and that your general approach to filling the gap in knowledge is sound.
So whether the feedback confirms your idea or causes you to pause and go back to the drawing board, both scenarios lead you to a Specific Aims page that will serve as a blueprint for writing your full application.
Get Your Blueprint Done
I hope you have a better understanding of why I believe your Specific Aims page is the most important page of your R01. Knowing you have a blueprint for writing your R01 can help your full application seem far less daunting a task. So if you are ready to draw up your blueprints and move so much closer to being a funded NIH researcher, I want to invite you to check out The Grant Funding Formula, our self-paced online course that walks you through how to write an NIH R01 grant, step by step. We give you worksheets, plug-and-play templates, and plenty of guidance to demystify the process so that you can write your R01 as efficiently as possible - and get a great score. Learn more and register to get immediate access to all the lessons and resources you need.