One thing you may think as you move through your graduate school journey is
"I can't wait until I get a faculty position or post doc! Then all my funding problems will be over!"
Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but if you plan an academic career as a researcher, a large part of your life will forever be spent on issues related to funding: Searching for relevant grants, filling out massive amounts of paperwork, waiting anxiously for word, the agony of rejection--and the ecstasy of funding receipt. Soon followed, of course, by the stress of grant/project management and accounting for their money and your progress. (Or lack thereof.)
So, while you may be able to upgrade your diet from dried noodles in a rectangular plastic package, you will still be spending an inordinate amount of time begging--er, I mean, applying for research funding.
In this context, I believe it is never too early to begin familiarizing yourself with grant opportunities beyond the grad school level. That may seem like an odd bit of advice. Afterall, it is already a full-time job keeping up with deadlines and requirements for graduate student funding. But I think this is a necessary task if you suspect that research will even be a small part of your future career.
A great, great, great place to start is the National Institutes of Health (NIH) "New Investigators Program" web page:
New investigators are the innovators of the future - they bring fresh ideas and technologies to existing biomedical research problems, and they pioneer new areas of investigation. Entry of new investigators into the ranks of independent, NIH-funded researchers is essential to the health of this country's biomedical research enterprise. NIH’s interest in the training and research funding of new investigators is understandably deep and longstanding.
If you, like me, are a researcher in a social/behavioral research discipline, you may be wondering what this all has to do with you. Well, the NIH recognize that knowledge from non-biomed fields is necessary to the mission of improving the nation's health--especially in the areas of translating "basic" science to practice and evaluating effectiveness. There is even an entire office at the NIH concerned with behavioral and social research called, appropriately enough, the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR). The NIH and OBSSR define "behavioral and social science research" as
a large, multifaceted field, encompassing a wide array of disciplines. The field employs a variety of methodological approaches including: surveys and questionnaires, interviews, randomized clinical trials, direct observation, physiological manipulations and recording, descriptive methods, laboratory and field experiments, standardized tests, economic analyses, statistical modeling, ethnography, and evaluation. Yet, behavioral and social sciences research is not restricted to a set of disciplines or methodological approaches. Instead, the field is defined by substantive areas of research that transcend disciplinary and methodological boundaries. In addition, several key cross-cutting themes characterize social and behavioral sciences research. These include: an emphasis on theory-driven research; the search for general principles of behavioral and social functioning; the importance ascribed to a developmental, lifespan perspective; an emphasis on individual variation, and variation across sociodemographic categories such as gender, age, and sociocultural status; and a focus on both the social and biological context of behavior.
The many, many NIH webpages contain a wealth of information to help you begin to see how your work and interests might fit with the NIH mission. There are even webcasts of conferences and seminars highlighting exciting work being conducted by people with degrees like ours. One I have viewed and recommend is the "NIH Roadmap: Interdisciplinary Methodology and Technology Summit" that was held last summer.
I can't guarantee you that allocating a little of your time exploring these opportunities now will result in you getting a post-doc or K-award later. But at the very least it will give you something interesting and informative to do while you're eating your piping hot bowl of noodles.