Another important thing that you can be working on after you have submitted your grant are all of the relationships that you made. Maybe you met a lot of new friends in this process and working on keeping those relationships, because many of the people with whom you’ve developed relationships to get that grant written are people that are going to — that you’re going to need once the grant is funded. So maybe you initiated a relationship with a community clinic because that’s where you’re going to recruit your patients from. You don’t want to just forget that community clinic and say — and not contact them for 9, 12 months and say, “Oh, we’re ready to start the grant.” You want to keep that relationship going in some way or other.

Other important relationships to maintain are within that clinic where you’re either working or where you’re going to be working, and you need to be thinking about that infrastructure and how you’re going to integrate your study into that infrastructure. Ask a lot of questions. “How does somebody get a new study started here?” You’ve already justified — you’ve already written in your grant how you won’t be competing for patients, but just how do patients get referred to research studies? If yours is one of many, maybe there’s a central place that that happens. If yours is the only one, how will you get word out with your colleagues or within your department about your study? This sort of gets on advertising and how are you going to get the word out? The IRB has to approve any advertising materials that you’re going to use and so pre-approval of those or working on those materials and a recruitment plan would also be an important startup/pre-startup activity that you can engage in to help jumpstart your grant when that money does come in.