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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

#121

Post by 3pt14159 »

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've gotten a fair amount of grant money from different Canadian research grants, some retrospective, some prospective. I've also written grants as a side thing. Probably all summed together I've helped pull in around $1m–$2m.

I don't know about the academic side, but for corporate grants this part:

> sprinkle a bit of fad-ish topics into your research if even if it's a stretch to do so.

Does work, but only if the core thing you're tackling isn't as meritorious as what the reviewer is used to seeing. So, for example, one grant I wrote for a hardcore AI startup that had huge data engineering issues on a shoestring budget. Former Stanford, Google, etc folks. I didn't need to pull in anything. I just straight wrote the claim (retrospective grant applications are called claims) and we got a big cheque. Most of the work was meticulously going through their pull requests and estimating hours that were research vs traditional software development.

As an aside, I make around $5k per day with this type of work because I get pulled into the most technical claims and I'm very good at it, but I don't enjoy it as much as software development so I only take stuff that I think needs my help.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#122

Post by op00to »

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…

Getting your talk accepted to a tech conference is exactly the same way with unwritten criteria. People are crazy animals.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#123

Post by derbOac »

jcelerier wrote: post #118
derbOac wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those two messages are very different from my experience writing (and generally getting) grants in France. Grant reviewers are anonymous, how could you even butter them up ?

Not the reviewers, the agency officers overseeing the reviews and awards.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#124

Post by andi999 »

ModernMech wrote: post #60
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

> university overhead 53%, so that leaves $250K. At many universities large capital expenditures over some threshold ($5K for my institution) have no overhead. Also a lot of that money is supposed to go toward supporting students and that money is well spent.

How? From what are your admins paid then?

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#125

Post by Spooky23 »

anamax wrote: post #88
Spooky23 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They get paid for the whole institution. It’s not a contracting model in the traditional sense, it a model designed to support the educational mission of the university.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#126

Post by hyperbovine »

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…

How is this different than any other walk of life?

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#127

Post by dsqrt »

lumost wrote: post #46

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…

Most of the federal grants I am aware of have duration of 3+ year (the typical duration of a PhD after having completed the course work).

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#128

Post by notahacker »

derbOac wrote: post #61
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 awar…

Not just Theranos, virtually all early stage investment sees warm introductions as more important than a perfectly structured deck

Part of it's perfectly rational: faced with two competently written but not directly comparable proposals, knowing that one of the proposers is less of a mystery than the other is additional information about their ability to deliver, and part of it's humans being humans.

Ironically I'd see much of crypto and other investment bubbles as the opposite cognitive bias (who cares about the gaps in our knowledge, this number is going up faster than that number?)

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#129

Post by danielmorozoff »

ModernMech wrote: post #74
danielmorozoff wrote: post #24

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…

> 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. 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 th…

Respectfully, I disagree. The point you make about financial freedom, imho is an illusion. A few thoughts on your first point.

The NSF Career grant affords you the latitude to pursue your research interests, but those are inevitably aligned with the academic process as you are in pursuit of tenure. So you need to publish and you need to produce publishable work- very unlikely you will choose only high risk moonshot projects as your likelihood of receiving tenure is directly correlated to those publications. Furthermore, your statement that the NSF or the university is not an investor, is also flawed imo. The NSF specifically asks for impact as it ties the money it allots a research to economic impact to the US- as it should since it is tax payer money. I.e your investor is the US. A similar argument can be drawn to the university that provides you startup lab funds- their long term goal is to receive publications/ patents/ prestige they can the monetize against through either selling those ideas/ receiving royalties or donations go their foundations. As you become a more famous researcher you also attract more masters students who pay a good deal of money to go to school there. They are in fact your investor only expecting a different ROI...

As for companies- how much do you think an engineer or ml researcher costs per year to a company especially the caliber in a Phd lab? 500k expense is pretty small. your assumption that a company wont give you 500k to fo work is an illusion- they do it's just not hard cash, they spend on resources that you use. An average PhD level base salary at a Fang - 200+k plus bonus/ equity closing on over 300k?

So the real question is pick your poison.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#130

Post by [deleted] »

neel_k wrote: post #114
derbOac wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I went to one of these things, it was pretty much entirely about how to scope the work and how to write the proposal. Eg, for a big ERC grant, you need to propose something big and exciting enough to be worth 2 million euros, but small enough that you and 3 students/postdocs can do it in five years, since that's what 2 million euros can pay for. But our grant office did make sure that most of the speakers were p…

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