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Grant writing is an essential skill to develop for academic and other career success but providing individual feedback to large numbers of trainees is challenging. In 2014, we launched the Stanford Biosciences Grant Writing Academy to support graduate students and postdocs in writing research proposals. Its core program is a multi-week Proposal Bootcamp designed to increase the feedback writers receive as they develop and refine their proposals. The Proposal Bootcamp consisted of two-hour weekly meetings that included mini lectures and peer review. Bootcamp participants also attended faculty review workshops to obtain faculty feedback. Postdoctoral trainees were trained and hired as course teaching assistants and facilitated weekly meetings and review workshops. Over the last six years, the annual Bootcamp has provided 525 doctoral students and postdocs with multi-level feedback (peer and faculty). Proposals from Bootcamp participants were almost twice as likely to be funded than proposals from non-Bootcamp trainees. Overall, this structured program provided opportunities for feedback from multiple peer and faculty reviewers, increased the participants’ confidence in developing and submitting research proposals, while accommodating a large number of participants.

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Time to degree completion is an important metric of academic progress and success for doctoral students. It is also a common way for educational stakeholders to compare programs even if the content of the degree programs varies. But what types of behaviors and experiences are associated with faster times to degree? In this education article, we examine the relationship between receiving competitive research awards (e.g. grant writing) and time to degree for Ph.D. students. We organize our analyses by student identities, specifically gender and underrepresented minority (URM) status, to examine differences in time to degree based on student demographics. Our dataset included students that graduated between academic years 2008-09 through 2018-19. Using well known, open access computational tools, we find that URM women who won competitive research awards graduate faster than all other students who also won awards. We also find that URM women and all URM students graduate faster compared to students who did not win awards. Combined, these results show how competitive awards and grants can facilitate faster times to degree for some students. This study suggests similar introspective analyses at other institutions and databases are needed.