What a $500k grant proposal looks like
austinhenley.com
What a $500k grant proposal looks like
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Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#2That part about how some people have strong opinions about what absolutely needs to be in a proposal, but if you look at a handful of successful ones, there's no clear winning recipe, really resonated, having recently gone through this for a similar ERC competition.
The part about finding >10 typos is pretty much my nightmare, and I appreciate the candor with which you share that and other parts of your experience.
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#3As faculty in the UK on the receiving end of the current pension cuts that little voice telling me to leave for industry while I still can only gets louder when I hear about people jumping ship like the OP...
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#4> My university took a whooping 53% for overhead.
Highway robbery.
I love these kinds of breakdowns. It's very useful to help communicate successful models in people's crafts.
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#5also noteworthy elements:
university overhead 53%, so that leaves $250K. Over five years that works out to basically $50K/year
That needs to cover 1 month summer salary plus the salary and the tuition for a single student, and the travel to conferences, and the experiment ...
and that is a "prestigious" CAREER award only few people get ... no wonder the author jumped ship
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#6> My university took a whooping 53% for overhead. Highway robbery. I love these kinds of breakdowns. It's very useful to help communicate successful models in people's crafts.
I wonder how the university gets to the 53% overhead figure. Do they have a fully costed internal accounting of things like "rent" for lab space and share of administrators' time/salary?
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#7I am not in academia but the 53% overhead to an outsider is absurd! Probably the same reason tuition has gotten so high, someone has to pay for all those deans, vice deans and vice vice deans!
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#8> My university took a whooping 53% for overhead. Highway robbery. I love these kinds of breakdowns. It's very useful to help communicate successful models in people's crafts.
I'm very curious if this number is actually correct; in my experience "53%" overhead means the university adds a $0.53 "tax" on each dollar you spend, which works out to the university "taking" ~35% of the total amount. Still high, but not as high as I used to think.
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#9> My university took a whooping 53% for overhead. Highway robbery. I love these kinds of breakdowns. It's very useful to help communicate successful models in people's crafts.
I wonder how the university gets to the 53% overhead figure. Do they have a fully costed internal accounting of things like "rent" for lab space and share of administrators' time/salary?
They have a shockingly detailed model that they negotiate with the federal government ! https://cfo.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/facilities_and_...
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#10also noteworthy elements: university overhead 53%, so that leaves $250K. Over five years that works out to basically $50K/year That needs to cover 1 month summer salary plus the salary and the tuition for a single student, and the travel to conferences, and the experiment ... and that is a "prestigious" CAREER award only few people get ... no wonder the author jumped ship
Actually the math doesn't work quite like that, but it's a common misconception. 53% indirect costs (overhead) is multiplied on the direct costs rather than the total amount, so it is actually 500K-500K/(1+0.53) = 173K taken by the university assuming the full amount can be charged indirect. In practice, some charges like tuition and equipment do not have indirects, so the actual amount taken by the university would be about 135K +- 35K out of the 500K. So you get about 365K of direct spendable money from the 500K if the overhead rate is 53% (as it is at the University of Tennessee where the author was).
The indirect cost rate is decided by the federal government based on data by the universities, so it's accounted for in the grant award amounts. So it's not as nefarious as it sounds.