I was just sitting here thinking about all the different ways I love grant writing. I mean there’s…<\/p>\n
…er…<\/p>\n
Ok, not much at all to love.<\/p>\n
Well there is that unique <\/em>state of mind, a seemingly impossible superposition of terrified and stressed into pulling your third all-nighter, while also being bored out of your skull. But the word I would use to describe that would not be “love”. (It’s actually pretty similar to thesis-writing).<\/p>\n I understand the need to justify why you should get money to do research, but it’s a pretty frustrating process. It takes a tonne of time since these grant applications are usually huge (even just doing scholarship apps earlier in my grad school days used to take up a full two weeks out of every year), yet the success rate is quite low, on the order of 10% (or worse!). So it’s especially frustrating to sometimes get rejected and find the reviewer’s comments were, well… stupid. Like they didn’t even read the proposal, or didn’t understand the point <\/em>of the competition, or created a list of tiny nit-picks, but the criticism was enough to not get funded anyway.<\/p>\n I would much rather just give a 2-hour or whatever presentation to the grant committee, especially since it might let them ask questions, avoiding arbitrary denials due to a reviewer skimming a grant and missing a point, or misunderstanding something. Though I do appreciate that with the low success rate (small amount of funds compared to applications) they seek any <\/em>reason to burn an application, it is just so disheartening to see a month’s worth of work (and the next 3 years of funding) go down the drain because some reviewer phoned it in.<\/p>\n Anyhow.<\/p>\n There was a little discussion<\/a> at some other blogs<\/a> about how we do science<\/a>. I don’t want to comment too much right now since I don’t really have any good suggestions on how we should <\/em>structure science, but something does need to be done, at the very least in the personnel department: as discussed on the other blogs, the post-doc system doesn’t really work. We shouldn’t be penalizing people for trying to put down roots and stay in one place, indeed, in other fields that’s called experience <\/em>and is considered a virtue. I’m attracted to that idea of a scientist position: like a post-doc, where you do science on a day-to-day basis and aren’t a professor\/group leader, except an actual job, with security, benefits, living wage, a place in the organizational structure (rather than a not-student not-employee), and a future. I can’t say though if that otherworldly romantic notion is at all practical, or how we get there from here. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was just sitting here thinking about all the different ways I love grant writing. I mean there’s… …er… Ok, not much at all to love. Well there is that unique state of mind, a seemingly impossible superposition of terrified and stressed into pulling your third all-nighter, while also being bored out of your skull. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}