What a $500k grant proposal looks like • Hacker News Board

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#81

Post by cbhl » Thu, Feb 24, 2022, 4:13 AM UTC

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…

Sure, but what are new grad salaries in industry these days? 100k-200k/yr base?

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#82

Post by Lascaille » Thu, Feb 24, 2022, 4:17 AM UTC

Thanks for this, this is interesting.

I agree, when doing something like this it's hard to know what it should look like in order to be recognised professionally and having a template or example is a huge huge help.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#83

Post by Lascaille » Thu, Feb 24, 2022, 4:23 AM UTC

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…

>OP spent a lot of time preparing an application for a very prestigious academic-career-making grant, succeeded in getting it

He looked into the abyss long enough for it to look back.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#84

Post by gwerbret » Thu, Feb 24, 2022, 4:23 AM UTC

azhenley wrote: post #69

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 :)

Nevertheless! Care to share your story? What turned you away from academia?

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#85

Post by Lascaille » Thu, Feb 24, 2022, 4:24 AM UTC

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #40

dwohnitmok wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That overhead honestly doesn't seem that high to me. If I think about private companies with low need for physical equipment (e.g. software companies) I suspect the overhead would be comparable if not greater. Usually I hear ~100% as an average figure (keeping in mind that overhead is defined as a percentage of non-overhead costs so 100% means half of your money spent is on overhead). But I'm not that confident. Woul…

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 is my billing rate to the government is 2.8 times my hourly rate as determined by my salary.

Why does your salary define the overhead rate for the entire company?

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#86

Post by kaycebasques » Thu, Feb 24, 2022, 4:30 AM UTC

Browsing the author's site, I notice they have a post about Information Foraging Theory, a framework that has been very helpful for me in my technical writing career! https://austinhenley.com/blog/informationforaging.html

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#87

Post by azhenley » Thu, Feb 24, 2022, 4:41 AM UTC

gwerbret wrote: post #84

azhenley wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might not be very rational :)

Nevertheless! Care to share your story? What turned you away from academia?

I wasn’t happy.

I shared a bit more detail here: https://austinhenley.com/blog/leavingacademia.html

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#88

Post by anamax » Thu, Feb 24, 2022, 4:57 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #77

anamax wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sort of thing is factored into the programs and policies. Efficiency isn’t really the point. 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…

The janitors are paid for by the rent.

The "efficiency" here is that the university gets paid for an asset that it didn't pay for.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#89

Post by yuuu » Thu, Feb 24, 2022, 5:01 AM UTC

azhenley wrote: post #87

gwerbret wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevertheless! Care to share your story? What turned you away from academia?

I wasn’t happy. I shared a bit more detail here: https://austinhenley.com/blog/leavingacademia.html

How do you cope with the feeling that you're missing out on future prestige?

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#90

Post by langsoul-com » Thu, Feb 24, 2022, 5:12 AM UTC

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 believe that's the problem with most not for profits. Their bottom line is very arbitrary, so objective decisions are difficult.

Compared to, say if I was a paper clip salesman. What makes money and what loses is far more obvious. In addition, if the plan lost money, its immediately obvious and can be stopped