ABSTRACT
Scholarship from a range of medical and scientific disciplines captures the uncertainty that researchers experience when drafting successful specific aims and broader impacts for NIH and NSF grant proposals. This chapter presents a brief history of milestones relevant to the evolution of the specific aims and broader impacts sections as requirements for grant proposals, details the difficulties that scientists express about successfully producing these key sections of their proposals, and examines some of the professional development programs designed to help scientists better produce these sections, which is especially important for early career scientists, women, and scientists from underrepresented minority groups. While some of the scholarship promises a secret formula to consistently developing these portions of grant proposals, other scientists’ professional development programs illustrate the importance of planning and demystification of the strategies for achieving success.
