Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What a $500k grant proposal looks like

austinhenley.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 140 posts

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#61

Post by derbOac »

supernova87a wrote: post #29

You 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 wel…

I went to a grant writing workshop sponsored by the university. When I got there the entire thing, and I mean entire thing, was about buttering up the grant review officers, how to network with people at the agencies, how to work your way into being their friends, and so forth.

Not a single thing about the writing process, or how to frame your ideas, or anything like that.

I know that's not how grants are always awarded, but as a junior faculty member it's hard to know what to make of that, when a university-sponsored workshop is structured around those issues.

It's difficult for me to wrap my head around this all most of the time, to convey to an outsider what bothers me so much about the whole thing, or to even articulate it to myself. I can make comparisons to certain things (Theranos, cryptocurrencies, or economic bubbles) but it's very abstract and fuzzy and imperfect. So much of it seems empty to me, or false.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#62

Post by ModernMech »

countvonbalzac wrote: post #7

I 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!

Keep in mind that many researchers are given a huge startup package at the beginning of their career to jumpstart a research agenda. They also don't pay for any rent for lab space, electricity, and other campus resources. All of those expenses are basically paid for by the overhead tax. It's the lifeblood of any academic research institution.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#63

Post by anamax »

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…

The cool trick is that some of the direct costs are for things that the university didn't pay for.

Consider the building. Some rich people donate enough to pay for its construction. The university didn't pay anything. Moreover, that's a tax-deduction for them, so the Feds are effectively paying for part of it.

Now some sponsored research is to take place in that building. You guessed it, the university charges rent to the research grant. Remember that the university didn't pay for the building....

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#64

Post by s1artibartfast »

j7ake wrote: post #59

I wonder what conditions need to be improved in order to make faculty positions more attractive? 0% or negative overhead? No teaching? Longer Sabbaticals? Fewer admin duties? Be left alone to do research?

Faculty positions are already some of the most coveted and competitive jobs on the planet

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#65

Post by lumost »

PeterisP wrote: post #49
lumost wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Hire would certainly be a no go, but partnership/volunteer work could be viable. However that also would not meet the criteria of the grant.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#66

Post by jrochkind1 »

> The CAREER Award is a special 5-year grant that can only be applied for 3 times by an individual researcher in the first 6ish years of their career. It is deemed "prestigious" and at many schools it effectively means you'll get tenure.

> I was offered the award, but I declined it. Then I resigned from my faculty position and joined industry.

OK, we all want to hear more about this right? OP spent a lot of time preparing an application for a very prestigious academic-career-making grant, succeeded in getting it... and then quit!

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#67

Post by ModernMech »

supernova87a wrote: post #48
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 basicall…

> 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.

On what are you basing these assertions? As part of an NSF funded research project with an outreach component, we definitely had to deliver on it and I had to write about it in our annual reviews. If we had failed to deliver on our promises in a perfunctory of fictitious way, we definitely would have been in jeopardy of having our funding pulled.

The NSF doesn't have to take back money because they don't give you all of the money up front. They can refuse to give you the rest of your funding, and then good luck on your next NSF grant proposal.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#68

Post by ModernMech »

908B64B197 wrote: post #13

If 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.

Researchers should absolutely be required to ruminate on the broader public impacts of their research when requesting vast sums of money from the public.

I once heard a researcher on NPR being interviewed about the ethical considerations of Deep Fake research and their answer was (parphrased) "I don't think about these things, I just do the science. The ethical impacts are for others to think about" and I jaw hit the floor.

Today we see the unintended consequences of various technologies finding confluence in the public sphere, and the impacts are reverberating across society. Now more than ever researchers have to be cognizant of the broader societal impacts of their work.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#69

Post by azhenley »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #66

> The CAREER Award is a special 5-year grant that can only be applied for 3 times by an individual researcher in the first 6ish years of their career. It is deemed "prestigious" and at many schools it effectively means you'll get tenure. > I was offered the award, but I declined it. Then I resigned from my faculty position and joined industry. OK, we all want to hear more about this right? OP spent a lot of time prep…

I might not be very rational :)

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#70

Post by dwohnitmok »

bena wrote: post #52
michaelrpeskin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m at a small software company that does lots of smallish (500k-1.5M) contracts like this. The government does audits to determine our overhead rate. Our is 2.8. That is my billing rate to the government is 2.8 times my hourly rate as determined by my salary. That pays for rent, benefits, and for things like the employees who aren’t on direct labor (e.g. accounting, HR, etc)

That means your overhead rate would be around 65%.

No it does mean the overhead is 280% if defined the same way as the university (overhead is calculated as percentage of non-overhead costs, not overall costs).

But I'm not sure whether the company would count just an employee's salary as non-overhead costs. I'm fuzzy on the details of how overhead is usually calculated.

Post reply on HN