71–80 of 140 posts
> 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…
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 awar…
The researchers essentially rank the proposals and decide the outcome:: proposals at the top of the ranking will be funded until money dries out.
Researchers do not know how to evaluate grants the way the NSF wants them to do it. Researchers know how to review papers but not NSF proposals. The broader impacts expectations of the NSF are as obscure to the researchers in the panel as for everyone else. At a panel, after discussing the scientific merits of the proposal, the NSF officers asked the researchers in the panel for broader impacts in the proposal. The first day, the researchers kept pin-pointing (what they thought could be) broader impact items that the NSF officers rejected. As time went by, researchers in the panel started figuring out what kind of broader impacts the NSF officers expected, and could use it to push proposals they liked because of the science. Broader impact sections of the proposals were used to supercharge an already interesting proposal based on the science.
While 15-20 researchers may be in the panel, a few of those will be leading the discussions because of character and interest of looking at these proposals. If these researchers have integrity, the panel will do a decent job. I am sure it is highly dependent on the panel, but the ones I participated in, I thought we did a decent job, maybe with an inclination towards funding young PIs who never got funded before. But networking with NSF officers didn't help any PI; the science dominated the ranking.
Polished broader impact statements appear naturally in tier 1 universities that have many examples and templates of previously funded proposals. Most of it is window dressing; of course there are genuine initiatives but that's not the norm. Asking for diversity statements or whatnot will favor applicants from the alumni and PIs of the Stanfords and Harvards who can network with their peers to gather existing successful statements. After a few generation of sharing these statements, the polishing gets really really good and looks quite serious. It's fairly easy to write broad impact statements with 5 funded examples, much harder when you have none and nobody to talk to (does requiring diversity statements in applications actually hurt diversity candidates? Who knows, studying that question would likely not get funding).
Successful proposals read really well, so well that you wonder how much of the proposed research is already solved. That is a strategy used to write some proposal: when the NSF deadline comes, pick your 1 or 2 most significant unpublished working drafts and write a proposal on the results. Some results you know you already have, others could be interesting generalizations that are within reach, and add to the mix maybe one sexy moonshot. Because you had the paper underway, the story and notation are things you already thought about for a while, and the resulting proposal looks pretty good. If the proposal gets funded, you already have some results to show; good job.
Source: academic who also got CAREER the first time, somewhat burnt out by all these games. Don't get me started on academic awards (the ones with a famous name attached to it)--but let me just say that staying away from those will delay the burnout, a bit; those games are much more rigged than NSF panels.
Having 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 s…
It's not just about the $500k, it's about the freedom to do your project your way from start to finish. I can't get $500k from any investors to do my work; their number one question is what's their ROI, which is not even in the universe of my concerns. The last thing I ever want to think about is how to profit from my research.
Another choice is to join a company and then convince that company my idea is worth while. If I get the greenlight to go ahead that's great, but then I'm still always living under the threat of being fired or the project getting canned. Any University is happy to have a CAREER recipient, and your award is portable between institutions.
And sure you'd possibly be able to convince your company to sponsor a project you're interested in leading, but the for something like $500k you'd better have a good business case for it, and I can't imagine them approving something that would last 5 years unless it really aligns with their business goals. In order to get the clout to actually ask for this kind of project you'd also need to be at the company for a while, whereas something like a CAREER award is intended for early-career faculty. Imagine going up to your boss and saying: "You know that job you hired me for? I'd like you to keep paying me my regular salary, but I'd also like $500k to work on my own pet project about 70% of the time from September to May, and 100% over the summer. Oh, and I'd like to do this for the next 5 years."
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 abou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
You don’t pay for the building, but a bunch of Vice Associate Provosts get paid to do something and the union janitors make a living.
Economists can map this crap to direct and indirect labor hours generated and other economic metrics. At some level we do this stuff as a type of work program. Somebody calculates how many hotel nights and cheeseburgers are consumed for each construction dollar spent, etc.
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!
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 3…
More voluminous grants would be riskier and harder to evaluate, AIUI. As of today, the idea is that a grant functions both as a prize for having a competitive proposal in the first place, and as a wager on behalf of broader society on the actual research impact. So yes, grant proposals take time to craft but that's just part of the game, and arguably of the actual research that you'll be doing.
We are already taking the societal risk of employing a professor and giving them grant money - at least we can get the productive side of the money we spend.