Queen’s Best Practices for NSERC CREATE Letters of Intent

Key points:

- This is a grant program for research training, not for research as such. CREATE grants are funded from the NSERC’s “People” budget from which fellowships are made – that also explains some of the restrictions on eligible expenses (no research material and supplies, no travel for professors). The graduate students in the program will of course also do research, and this research area has to be “of high priority to Canada”, but the objective of the grants is to support training programs that encourage collaborative/integrative approaches and/or facilitate the transition of HQP into the Canadian workforce.

- the main objective is to fund “value-added” training, so you need to emphasize what your program would add to the training of the students beyond what they would get from just being regular graduate students, in particular: collaborative/interdisciplinary training, increased student mobility (international, to companies and other universities), improved job readiness. The committee expects to see explicit training in soft/professional skills. The committee considers the professional skills and soft skills training as a “core required element” of any CREATE project.

- the committee expects a lot of details even in the LOI, just to give some examples: which specific new courses will be developed (with some indication of course content and structure/pedagogical approach), which program components are optional or required for which type of students, how long are the internships or visits to other labs, and in which semester of their program will PhD and MSc students do them, is a report required at the end of the internship, etc.

- Letters of Intent are only reviewed by a generalist CREATE panel, they are not sent out for external review by experts, so the LOI has to be written for an audience with a general scientific background and/or expertise in training and education and/or a business background.

- This is a very competitive program, in 2017, only 15.6% of LOIs were ultimately funded. As a result, the committee has expectations that exceed the guidelines on NSERC’s webpage.

1. Putting together the right team and concept

  • The lead applicant (PI) must be from an NSERC-supported field at an NSERC-eligible university.
  • According to the webpage, proposals can involve more than 1 university but don’t have to involve multiple universities. However, the committee seems to consider it a negative to limit a proposal’s team to a single university. Therefore, our recommendation is now to involve researchers from other Canadian universities. The average number of applicant and co-applicant institutions for CREATE grants is around 4.
  • Value-added training and professional and soft skills training have to have a key role in the proposal. Innovative pedagogy or interestingly different approaches might give you the edge.
  • All universities who will be involved in the application must have at least one co-applicant listed in the proposal.
  • Researchers can participate in a maximum of two CREATE grantsand/or LOIs at the same time–as either an applicant or co-applicant.
  • At least 70 percent of the group must be from NSE fields, but co-applicants at the interdisciplinary frontier between NSE and the areas covered under the umbrella of SSHRC and CIHR may be incorporated into proposals, if, by combining the strengths of the various disciplines, a greater impact is achieved for the trainees. Applicants submitting proposals at the interdisciplinary frontiers of the granting agencies may be required to justify why NSERC is in fact the most appropriate funding agencyfor their training proposals.
  • The committee is now expecting applicant teams to be more gender balanced and diverse, and to include recruitment strategies to achieve better gender balance and diversity in the trainee pool: explicit reference to gender balance was part of the committee’s feedback on almost all proposals last year.
  • The focus should be on new training initiatives. Existing initiatives must justify the incremental value that will accrue from the CREATE Program. The NSERC webpage says that it is OK to build on existing resources like the Mitacs workshops for professional skills training, but the new aspects of the proposed training program should be very prominent.
  • There is an emphasis that the proposed CREATE has to be different from existing ones, including CREATE projects led by other universities. Potential applicants should check the list of CREATE projects awarded in the last few years to avoid duplication:
  • The committee likes to see that all components of the proposed program are open to all trainees, or at least to a large fraction of the trainees.
  • The program should try to offer all or most trainees an option for increased mobility, e.g., internship at company, work with a co-applicant at a different Canadian university, stay at a lab of an international collaborator, etc.
  • Mandatory internships and other immersive experiences in real-world/work place settings appear to be very important for successful CREATE applications
  • At least 80 percent of the CREATE grant must be used for trainees’ stipends, and the eligibility of expenses is different than for other NSERC grants (scroll down to “Eligible Expenses” on this page: : this limits somewhat what you can propose and what the CREATE co-applicants have to pay from other sources (e.g., usually a part of the student’s stipend, all research costs). The FAQ page includes additional information on certain types of expenses, e.g. travel costs for visiting international students.
  • No budget is required for the LOI, but the LOI has to include a table of how many trainees of which degree type will be trained, so applicants will have to make a rough budget to figure out how many students they will be able to support. When creating this preliminary rough budget, please note the following two changes that NSERC has announced for 2018: 1. Requested amounts per year can vary by up to +-50K from the default value ($150K in Y1 and $300K/y for Y2-6), as long as the total does not surpass $1.65m 2. The salary of the coordinator can now be funded from the NSERC grant throughout the 6 years of the grant, as long as it is still the case that at least 80% of the grant is spent on student stipends.
  • Collaborators (e.g., international colleagues) cannot receive funding, not even for travel. Therefore, if you wish to bring someone in to give a guest lecture, it might be worth not including them as a collaborator, as they can then receive travel funding.
  • Although NSERC has the following priority areas: Environmental science and technologies; Natural resources and energy; Manufacturing; and Information and communications technologies, NSERC gives no preference to CREATE proposals covering topics in these areas. We have been successful in getting non-priority area CREATE proposals awarded, so if you have a great proposal concept then don’t let the lack of overlap with those areas hold you back.
  • The focus should be on training graduate students. PDFs and undergrad training can also be included as it is recognized that training undergrads is a graduate student recruitment tool, and PDFs are heavily involved in graduate student training, but the focus has to be on graduate level trainees, and you need to justify how including the postdocs and undergraduates will benefit the training of the graduate students and not simply assume the committee will appreciate their value.
  • CREATE grants cannot be renewed. If a previous CREATE grant member is part of the applicant team of a new CREATE initiative, the proposed initiative must differ significantly from the previous one. This has to be clearly explained in the new LOI. It is a good idea to call the program officer to discuss if what you are proposing is different enough. Based on past experience, the new proposal has to be very different (new team, new topic and new approach). That being said, the committee commented several times that team member’s participation in past CREATE grants “could be an added value”.

Also to consider at the conceptual stage:

- If you are considering a CREATE proposal with an international dimension: the official joint programs with other countries have low success rates because they need to be approved in both countries independently. If one country declines a proposal, then researchers in neither country get funding even if one of the countries approved. Consider including your foreign collaborators only as collaborators, and submitting the proposal as a regular CREATE.

- Industrial stream: many researchers find that the requirement that students need to spend 20% of their studies in industrial internships for industrial stream CREATEs can be difficult to accommodate without increasing the degree time of students, which is not allowed. Please note that Industrial Stream applications don’t have a higher success rate – at the webinar the NSERC program officer said that so far it hasn’t really factored into the decision process if applications were submitted under the Industrial Stream or not. Internships can be integrated into a regular stream CREATE, so that is something to consider as an alternative, but if the internships are part of a regular CREATE you will have more flexibility regarding the duration of the internships and whether an internship has to be mandatory for all participants.

2. Evaluation of CREATE Letters of Intent

  • As mentioned already, Letters of Intent are only reviewed by a generalist CREATE panel (see committee members: , they are not sent out for external review by experts, so the LOI has to be written for an audience with a general scientific background and/or expertise in training and education and/or a business background.

The evaluation criteria at the LOI stage differ from those at the full application stage. In the LOI you need to emphasize the following two evaluation criteria:

•Merit of proposed training program (60% at the LOI stage)

•Excellence of the research team (40% at the LOI stage)

Management and Sustainability are not evaluated at the LOI stage, but management has to be addressed at least briefly in the 2 pages about the team, as per the NSERC instructions.

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Throughout the proposal writing process, re-read the definitions of these two criteria at the end of this webpage to make sure that you are covering all subcriteria.:

(Note: percentages given there are for the full application stage.)

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You also need to convince the committee that your proposed initiative is “significantly” different from any previous CREATE project, especially those thatanyone from the applicant team has been involved in, otherwise your proposal will be disqualified. You have an extra page to explain that.

3. Advice for writing CREATE Letters of Intent

NSERC’s instructions are givenhere.:

Please follow all of NSERC’s instructions. CREATE LOIs require form 187 and are entered via the NSERC Online System: .

Form 187 will be available on the online system in March 2018.

Additional advice and clarification is given below.

LOI Sections:

Outline of Training Program (maximum 2 pages)

Note: If you are applying for the Industrial stream, then you must state this in the first sentence of the Outline of Training Program section.

Objectives and summarize the approach

Originality and Novelty, expected significance
Explicitly describe what skills the CREATE students will have that they wouldn’t get as regular graduate students. Be as detailed about the proposed components of the program as you can squeeze into the 2 pages.
Even though the webpage states that you can build on existing resources and courses, the committee does seem to expect new courses, preferably with innovative pedagogy. Consider meeting with someone at the Teaching and Learning Centre to get some ideas for innovative teaching approaches. They can probably also help with identifying units at Queen’s that you can draw on to teach your trainees soft skills and professional skills.
Relevant quote from the evaluation criteria “the extent to which the program uses novel and interesting approaches to graduate student training in an integrated manner to provide an enriched experience for all participants”

Brief description of the research the trainees will be involved in
The description should focus on the proposed research for the trainees. Show that this is a research area of high priority for Canada. You need to include references to the current literature.

How trainees would be better prepared for careers
1. Show how the CREATE would prepare the trainees better for the job market than regular trainees you are graduating now (facilitating transition to the Canadian workforce)
2. Show how it will promote interaction of the students with the non-academic sector.
The committee expects a wide range of soft and professional skills training to be a significant component of the proposed program, including communication, commercialization and IP. For industry stream proposals, training should include leadership, business management, entrepreneurship and marketing skills.

Involvement of stakeholders
Describe how the supporting organizations and universities will contribute and how they will be involved in the training of the students, e.g., beyond internships. They do expect that all trainees will be exposed to non-academic organizations and companies, so try to build interactions of students with companies or non-academic organizations into the program, and describe the role of each partner organization in the training of the students.

Description of potential future employers, assessment of job prospects for trainees
Note that the committee expects to see concrete evidence that there is a need in industry for the kinds of skills that your program will provide the students with, both in terms of demand for graduates in the proposed area of research, and demand for the specific value-added skills. Detailed, convincing statistics seem to work as evidence, or you could try to get some strong quotes from your supporting organizations regarding their difficulty to find employees with the type of skills you’ll provide the students with.

Supporting Gender Representation and Advancement is now a section of the CREATE website. The 2018 webinar indicated that it is required to address significant gender imbalances in your discipline if applicable, and recruiting strategies for graduate students in disciplines with significant gender imbalances must be discussed.

Also include a table of # of trainees to be trained, as described in more detail in the NSERC instructions. Be careful in distinguishing the total number of student years funded vs. the total number of students expected to graduate from the program. Also distinguish the number of students funded from the proposed CREATE vs. the number of students participating in the proposed CREATE (which often includes self-funded scholarship students, and other trainees who can participate in certain parts of the proposed program without requiring stipends – this way you can show bigger impact since the number of students trained will be larger than the number of students for which CREATE pays stipends).It is important however to be explicit about what your numbers mean.

Additional Page (maximum 1 page)
If any of your team members were part of previous CREATE projects or are currently being supported by active CREATE projects, you’ll get one additional page for this section:

  • Previous CREATE grantees and co-grantees must clearly describe how this application differs from those already funded. CREATE grants finishing in March of the year following the proposal submission (that is, before the applied-for CREATE would start) are considered as having ended.
  • Researchers who are applying in a research area already supported by other active CREATE Grants must clearly describe how this application differs from those already funded.
  • A maximum of one additional page is permitted to explain either of these two situations. Failure to submit this information will result in the rejection of the LOI.
  • It is not possible to include this additional page in the attachments uploaded to the Outline of Training Program section or the Excellence of Proposed Team section (both of which have a software-enforced 2 page limit), so NSERC staff has indicated that this page should be uploaded into either the “Letter VIP Research” section or the “Letter Industry” section: you can append the extra page to the documents uploaded there, since those two sections don’t have a page limit.

Excellence of Proposed Team (2 pages)

  • Complementarities, rationale for team composition, how the team will collaborate
    The committee is taking the gender balance of the team (and the to-be-recruited students) very seriously and they have commented on that aspect a lot. Supporting Gender Representation and Advancement is now a section of the CREATE website. The 2018 webinar indicated that it is required to address significant gender imbalances in your discipline if applicable, and recruiting strategies for graduate students in disciplines with significant gender imbalances must be discussed.
  • Expertise
  • Roles, responsibilities within the training program and its management
    Industry representatives on the committee can also help to ensure workplace relevance

They do look at the h/month that all team members have entered, so choose those carefully, don’t make them too low.