The Ohio State University

 Faculty Proposal Tips

Eligibility

• Are all reporting requirements for all investigators up to date? Any investigator with outstanding annual or final reports will be automatically disqualified from all competition until reporting obligations are met.
• Are any investigators currently named on any active SEEDS grants? If this application is funded, would any
  investigators exceed the maximum number of active projects allowed?
  
• Are all investigators members of The Ohio State University community?
• Do all non-faculty investigators have permission from OSURF to serve as an investigator?  http://www.rf.ohio-state.edu
• Are some investigators really collaborators? Graduate students, post-doctoral trainees, and persons outside the university should be designated as collaborators.

Budget

• Check your budget against the amount requested on the cover page of your application.
• Check the arithmetic in your budget. (If there is more than one budget, do they add up to the total requested?)
• Be sure to include tuition and fees for graduate students.
• Faculty salaries are not allowed.
• Justify your budget as precisely as possible. Indicating $5,000 is requested for materials and supplies is not enough. What type of supplies? What are estimated prices? How many do you need? Be specific.

General

• Follow page limits for each category, as well as page limits for each section of the proposal.
• Follow the outline of required sections in the RFP and address each section. If a section is not applicable, it is helpful to indicate that, for instance:
       K. Resubmission Response
            Not applicable
       L. Previous SEEDS Funding
           Not applicable
   
• Did the file convert to PDF properly? Double check your proposal after converting it to a PDF.
• If a proposal is submitted once, do not submit a revision (even if it is before the deadline time); instead, contact seeds@osu.edu or call 330-202-3555, ext. 2638.
• Do not wait until 4:59 to submit the proposal that is due at 5:00 p.m. It can take a few seconds, and you may end up with a late submission. Late submissions are disqualified.

Proposal Reviews

• Provide contact information for the list of potential reviewers, including name, affiliation, address,phone, fax, and e-mail. Proposals cannot be sent out to reviewers if there is no way to contact them.
• Contact your reviewers to make sure they will review your proposal. Many proposals go without reviews because the potential reviewers are too busy, are out of the country, on sabbatical, or do not feel they are qualified to review the proposal.
• Write your proposal using language appropriate for an interdisciplinary review panel. Panels are made up of Research Committee members and thus are multi-disciplinary. It is unlikely that any one panel member is an expert in the field of any given proposal. Panel members are best able to support proposals written in language they can understand. It is up to the investigator to keep the jargon down and make the panel understand the proposal, even if it is outside their area of expertise.