funding

  • Spring Break

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  • Tenure Denial

    Have you ever noticed how certain words or certain phenomena seem never to be on your radar, you may even be completely oblivious to them, only to show up repeatedly over a very short time span? I remember a few years back coming across the word sinister, not exactly a word frequently used in daily…

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  • Monday Night Grumps

    I had a really, really long day. I spent 12 hours at work, and much of it on face time. I prepped a class, then taught the class, then spent the next 7 hours meeting with a total of 14 different students: 2 for office hours, 3 who are my research students about various points…

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  • Proposal Review Silliness

    Lately, I have been reviewing proposals and playing a game with myself  called “Guess how many grants the PI already has based solely on flipping through the proposal to see the formatting.” The correlation is quite pronounced: people who have a reader-friendly layout are universally better funded than those who don’t. When you start reading,…

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  • Proposals, Proposals…

    Two of my big grants are expiring in 2015. The NSF one cannot really be renewed; I basically need to apply for a completely new grant. The other one is in principle a competitive renewal, but is a renewal nonetheless, and I have high expectations of funding as we are quite productive on that project…

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  • Academoneya

    Over the past few weeks, I have read or heard several times that there are some academics who don’t consider those among their colleagues who run large groups and are prolific in experimental research to be worthwhile academic scholars. I am no experimentalist and some experimental collaborators have annoyed the hell out of me on…

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  • Funding Gaps

    I love my job. It’s awesome even when it’s not. But there are aspects of it that are best not thought about lest you really enjoy feeling helpless. One of them is being able fund research with students, which requires long-term planning and flexibility, through 3-year-grants with small budgets and very low paylines (probability of…

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  • We often read about the trials and tribulations of academic job seekers. But it’s not until you are on the other side and a few years into a professorship that you start seeing how a faculty search looks from the standpoint of your future colleagues. The first aspect is what goes on in the department.…

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