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What a $500k grant proposal looks like

austinhenley.com

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Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#41

Post by lumost »

deater wrote: post #39

as someone who couldn't manage getting hired by an R1 university, and also had three NSF CAREER proposals rejected, it's a bit sobering to see someone get it all so easily and then walk away from it. Not that I necessarily blame him, fairly burnt out on academia myself currently. Not getting a CAREER award can really set one back, both in time wasted applying but then having to compete with those who have them. I oft…

If there is no measurement, or limited enforcement - then I'd bet it's approximately equal to one or two visits.

Whenever someone tacks on way more requirements than could possibly be met, there is a natural prioritization. If after 5 years you didn't deliver on the core idea - then the NSF probably won't care that you completed all of the k-12 outreach. If you hit the research objectives out of the park, then they are going to demand you max out the k-12 outreach.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#43

Post by edmundsauto »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #35
ordersofmag wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Cost of space, cost of power, cost of business office staff to process the paychecks, cost of a bunch of CPA and auditors to make sure you're following all the federal regulations about how the money can be spend, cost of IT to provide WiFi and network jacks and bandwidth, cost of water in the water fountain, etc, etc.... At institutions where a large fraction of the work going on is grant funded if you didn't d…

> Cost of space, cost of power, cost of IT to provide WiFi and network jacks and bandwidth, cost of water in the water fountain Time to move to a WeWork? WeWork All Access - $3600/year. Or at home for "free" if no real lab is needed. > cost of business office staff to process the paychecks Time to move to Direct Deposit? For a grand total of $0! > cost of a bunch of CPA and auditors to make sure you're following all…

I think it’s your expectations that are out of whack. There is sticker shock, but pretty much everywhere else is higher.

Also, do you know what a clusterfuck it is if someone screws up accounting, payroll, or legal? Those systems are Byzantine and you really do need an expert to navigate them legally.

Institutions don’t take the risk that an individual might take.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#44

Post by rsfern »

hammock wrote: post #38

What is an "education plan" in the context of a grant proposal?

I thought it would mostly be training grad students, but they did a great job weaving the program into their undergrad courses and like professional outreach. That section of the proposal is super skimmable, each paragraph has a pithy bold summary header!

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#45

Post by lumost »

amcoastal wrote: post #28
xwdv wrote: post #20

Nothing 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.

I do wonder why academics don't open up research collabs with industrial engineers more frequently (without the corporation involvement). I can think of a half dozen academic research problems which are bottle necked on coding.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#46

Post by lumost »

I'd be curious what the impact of fewer but more voluminous grants would be on academia. As other commenters have noted this grant turns into roughly 1 student for 5 years working on the project for a professor. Even for this grant, you would expect that a professor would need 3-5 such ongoing grants to really keep the lab functional.

It took 2 weeks to craft this grant proposal. Assuming the average academic has a 30% hit rate and the average grant provides funding for ~1 year... then this translates to roughly 30 weeks per year. A somewhat extreme example, but I wouldn't be surprised if these numbers get worse as you move to lower tier universities - and better for higher tier universities.

Would it be better to simply grant lab's to researchers with a general research plan on a 3-5 year cadence?

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#47

Post by derbOac »

ordersofmag wrote: post #12
monkeybutton wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. Cost of space, cost of power, cost of business office staff to process the paychecks, cost of a bunch of CPA and auditors to make sure you're following all the federal regulations about how the money can be spend, cost of IT to provide WiFi and network jacks and bandwidth, cost of water in the water fountain, etc, etc.... At institutions where a large fraction of the work going on is grant funded if you didn't d…

It's an open secret that the indirect costs are budgeted to make profit for a university. That is, the stated costs exceed actual costs. This has been publicly discussed by former federal division heads in major outlets.

The problem with this is the universities rely on this funding to stay afloat, so there's a tail wagging the dog problem. Basically the evaluation of scientific merit then derives from a decision as to whether or not it can procure money from the federal government.

That in turn is driven by all sorts of factors:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I don't want to argue that grants are bad but I do think the system is broken. Everyone passes the buck to the federal government in this kind of shell game, and then the federal grant system becomes the [near] monopoly over scientific decision making.

The analogy I tend to use in my head is that it's like if your state gave out grants to fund plumbing projects, and people realized that these grants paid more than the actual costs for the project. You have a plumbing project, get the plumber to get a grant for you, and pocket the difference. So people stop hiring plumbers on the basis of the work they do per se, and instead hire them on the basis of their ability to procure state grants. That's kind of what the system works like now.

Do industry grants have larger overhead? It doesn't matter one way or another. That's a different issue. Two wrongs don't make a right either.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#48

Post by supernova87a »

deater wrote: post #39

as someone who couldn't manage getting hired by an R1 university, and also had three NSF CAREER proposals rejected, it's a bit sobering to see someone get it all so easily and then walk away from it. Not that I necessarily blame him, fairly burnt out on academia myself currently. Not getting a CAREER award can really set one back, both in time wasted applying but then having to compete with those who have them. I oft…

I found those NSF outreach requirements very frustrating, because I knew (or believed) that aside from some actually conscientious and dedicated people, most everyone was making up perfunctory or fictitious plans for how they would satisfy this requirement if they got the grant.

And the NSF would not be checking on whether people actually did those things, or take back the money if they weren't fulfilled, so basically (I felt at the time) it was incentivizing people to lie about their intentions. I didn't feel good about making up such stories. So I guess I lost out to those who were willing.

If you're going to put in requirements like this, I think you'd better follow up and make sure people don't take you for fools and say what you want to hear but not do it later.

(edit to add: my experience is based on having been through this 15 years ago, so it's probably to be taken with a grain o salt)

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#49

Post by PeterisP »

lumost wrote: post #45
amcoastal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do wonder why academics don't open up research collabs with industrial engineers more frequently (without the corporation involvement). I can think of a half dozen academic research problems which are bottle necked on coding.

That grant proposal should answer your question - what's going to pay for that industrial engineer in that collab? You get $50k/year for 5 years and you can't even pay that to an outside engineer since then your proposal wouldn't fulfill the education goals by having a grad student 'trained' through doing that thing. (quoting OP of what the annual budget covers - "1 month of summer salary for myself, 1 grad student at an above-average salary plus tuition, no equipment, alternating international and domestic conference trips for both myself and the grad student, and funds to pay participants in user studies".

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#50

Post by soheil »

lazyjeff wrote: post #10
glofish wrote: post #5

also 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…

Also I don't think that is taxable income so basically multiply by 1.67 since most people end up paying roughly 40% of their income in state/federal taxes, social security, medicare, etc.
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