You Always Need a Mentor Posted on January 14, 2008 Line-by-line analysis of grant proposals is expensive but invaluable, says F. Xavier Castellanos (bio).

You never get to the point where you don't need a mentor. The higher I go, the more I need mentoring because that's just the nature of this. We all have blind spots; we all think we're communicating well. But writing a grant is about being compelling, about communicating a vision that's inside my head to a sleepy, overworked, exhausted reviewer that is doing the best they can to keep track of this complicated mish-mash that's written out in front of them and is probably reading it in bits and pieces whenever they can in those 10 minutes of protected time that sort of come up in between appointments.

And so that's just the reality that the writer of that grant needs to take that into account, needs to be able to really get the reviewer excited as to why this is the most compelling science that can be done at this moment. And you only can tell whether or not you're doing it by getting feedback from people. We all think it's great when we write it, but until someone says, "Well, this didn't make sense," or "This was confusing," or "This was ambiguous," or "What about that?" Until we get that feedback, we go, "Oh, I thought it was clear, but I guess it's not."

So that's one of the most critical pieces, and, again, that's incredibly expensive, to read somebody's grant in detail, not just to give them a global, "It looks good. It seems like you're on the right track," but to go word by word and to say, "I've rewritten this sentence for you. What do you think about that?" is incredibly expensive but critical.

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