> 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.
[deleted]
What a $500k grant proposal looks like
21–30 of 140 posts
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#22As 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...
[Tangent] Educators just aren't as valued as they used to be. This is a significant issue in my family, as I come from a clan full of teachers of many types.
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#23If you read the proposal, the 8th section is the forced diversity statement and goal. I was expecting it to be a little bit more obvious.
The 'Broader Impacts' section the proposal is a required element for all National Science Foundation proposals (like this one). It need not be about diversity but you need to articulate how your proposed work has "potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes." So certainly it's forced. In the same way demonstrating the Intellectual Merit of your work is also forced (that being the other criteria against which the proposal is going to be judged).
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#24Having written NSF grants and other grants - DARPA etc. I have won some and lost many. I compiled a few non obvious takeaways:
- Story telling is everything. It seems this is a huge lesson never taught in grad school.
- Technical details sometimes work against you. The author is absolutely right that getting the general thought process across is crucial.
- Who you get on your review committee tends to significantly skew the outcome. Can make or break your chances.
- I have known a lot of groundbreaking work funded by other money for these exact reasons. Sometimes good science is too far afield for people to understand. An anecdote i like from recent times is how Eric Betzig built the super res microscope. Here's the background.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/04/quitting-failures-a-...
TLDR: he won the Nobel...
The sad truth is $500k for a career grant seems like a lot when you're in the university, but when you get out and see where else money is being spent you realize how poor academia really is.
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#25also 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…
Point is the same
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#26Nothing in this proposal should take 5 years. For $250k you can easily do this research in a single focused year probably. I imagine researchers must actually be doing multiple grants in parallel or have other main jobs to earn decent money because if they only do this one thing at a time I have no idea why someone would choose this life of poverty when they could be making solid six figures building practical things…
A lot of the work involves training PhD students to do the research, it’s a big component particularly for NSF funding. So it’s not just the raw research output
And yeah, most professors try to have multiple programs going. This one would have funded one student for a few years
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#27Nothing in this proposal should take 5 years. For $250k you can easily do this research in a single focused year probably. I imagine researchers must actually be doing multiple grants in parallel or have other main jobs to earn decent money because if they only do this one thing at a time I have no idea why someone would choose this life of poverty when they could be making solid six figures building practical things…
Folks submitting Career grants already have nominally full-time time jobs as faculty with corresponding full-time salaries. The jobs are usually termed '9-month' appointments to allow them time in the summer to get paid for research. So the 5 year timeline reflects that this is not most of what they are doing. Certainly if you have CS background and you're mostly interested in making money this is not the career path for you.
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#28Nothing in this proposal should take 5 years. For $250k you can easily do this research in a single focused year probably. I imagine researchers must actually be doing multiple grants in parallel or have other main jobs to earn decent money because if they only do this one thing at a time I have no idea why someone would choose this life of poverty when they could be making solid six figures building practical things…
Yeah, but that's the way these things go. The people working on this project are working on 5 other ones as well. It would be nice to work on fewer research projects at once but the way these grants work (check out the low total amount), its generally unfeasible. Its sort of laughable extremely hard to get grants from the NSF, DoD etc. wouldn't even pay 2 typical FAANG SE 1 year FTE.
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#29You know, the thing I always found extremely frustrating or non-transparent about the academic grant process (and it leaks over into government / NSF / etc applications by the nature of who evaluates those: academics again) is how much unofficial or unspoken criteria come into it.
You get extra credit points if you're active in visiting other universities and giving talks on the annual job circuit. You tend to do well if you advisors are well-connected. You have to sprinkle a bit of fad-ish topics into your research if even if it's a stretch to do so.
I suppose that it has always been so. And now looking back, I don't find huge fault in that you should be able to connect your research with larger ideas. Or that people in richer environments with more information are generally more successful.
But having tried to be on the faculty track before, from a middle-tier university, I never knew these things. Or the professors I was around never told me those unofficial factors. And I thought it very unfair that the judges allowed those factors to creep into their consideration without making it clear to everyone that those were important. If giving talks in person is important, tell people at least.
I naively (I guess) thought that the strength of what you wrote in the application/grant document dominated. Maybe it does for some fields or if reviewers are diligent about understanding the blinders they wear and their availability bias.
Well, anyway, I left the field all the same. No regrets, but I wish these fields would improve their explicit processes about it.
I do note with some amusement now in industry, that basically I am able to approve spending of $500k for certain things with approximately a 30 minute conversation with leadership (with appropriate justification and documentation)...
Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like
#30I was involved in writing a grant relating to product development (Singapore has a SG$250k grant for developing product prototypes). Between 5 colleagues, I estimate there was a bare minimum of 300 hours of work... the application itself, multiple rounds of follow ups and justifications, documentation/receipts on how money was spent, etc.