1. Career Award Advice Brian Denton
Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering
North Carolina State University

2. My Background
PhD in Operations Research from McMaster University in Canada (2000)
Senior Engineer at IBM ( )
Senior Associate Consultant at Mayo Clinic ( )
New Faculty member, Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, NC State University, Starting Fall 2007

3. Warning The following are just my opinions and what worked for me.
You should get advice from as many people as you can and then form your own opinions. I recommend talking to:
Your NSF program director
People that have served on CAREER panels in the past
Faculty in your department

4. Things to do Be lucky  Read the proposal instructions very carefully
Talk to your program director
Go to the CAREER workshop
Start early
Send your proposal to people for advice, comments, and editing
Write about what you really want to do
Think BIG
Take the education piece very seriously

5. Things to do Look at other people’s proposals
Get strong letters of support
Use section headings and figures to make it easy for the reviewer to “flip through”
Think in terms of PhD theses, and include a lot of them
Provide a very long range career plan
Don’t worry if you aren’t successful. Most of the process is productive anyway.

6. Things NOT to do Wait until the last minute
Make the scope too narrow or too broad
Use technical language specific to your field
Make the education plan too generic
Submit before you are ready