2021 NSF ENG CAREER Workshop and Assessment of CAREER Workshop Effectiveness from 2004 – 2020

This award supports the organization of a National Science Foundation Directorate for Engineering 2021 Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Proposal Writing Workshop. The workshop will be held in the Spring of 2021 and will be virtually conducted. It is expected that there will be approximately 300 attendees.

The workshop will take place over 2-3 days to account for a wide variety of time zones and the participants’ existing commitments with teaching, family life balance, and research. The workshop will include interactive sessions on good proposal-writing practices, seminars by previous CAREER awardees, a mock CAREER proposal panel review. The attendees will also have an opportunity to interact with current NSF Program Directors.

This workshop will help to prepare CAREER program-eligible faculty for careers in education and research by giving them tools and skills of good proposal-writing for submissions to the CAREER program as well as core NSF ENG programs. The objectives of the workshop include training for junior faculty with an emphasis on women and underrepresented minorities in engineering.

A special additional emphasis will be placed on encouraging CAREER program eligible faculty from non-"Research-1" institutions and Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) to apply for participation. The workshop will serve as an introduction to NSF for many new researchers. The workshop will help participants to clarify their research and education career plans and to understand the need to clearly articulate these plans to external reviewers.

In addition, the workshop includes mock panel sessions to give participants the experience of simulated panel evaluation discussions. All of the content and experiences will help attendees enrich their skills for writing successful research proposals on impactful research that benefits societal needs. The PIs of the grant plan to evaluate past ENG CAREER workshops for best practices.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.