In my first semester of graduate school, I wrote a research proposal for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Program. I had no guidance on how to write a proposal for this very competitive fellowship program. Many websites seem to contradict each other on the guidance that they gave. Ultimately, I was unsuccessful at attaining the fellowship.
The next semester, after I had written multiple academic papers, I then applied for an NIH T-32 Predoctoral Fellowship. When I started working on my proposal, I felt like I had learned more about what I had done wrong on...