There's a woman at my university who is just a year older than I am, and finished her PhD a few years ahead of me. The most famous member of my committee whom I loved and I didn't get to spend much time with was her advisor and has been her co-author on at least half a dozen papers. And she's really nice, so I can't dislike her, as gratifying as that would feel. I met up with her recently, and thought immediately of this Sylvia character who does everything more beautifully. When I was reading these comics back in straight-A high school 4.8 GPA days, I thought I understood, but now I realize I couldn't. Now I do!
Beyond being recognized as a junior expert in one of the areas where I do research (and am only locally a semi-expert), due to having collaborated with her famous advisor on many papers, and doing interesting work, she is also more perfect than I could imagine being personally: she's married to a successful academic guy her age, lives in a great location, with one child so far, is effortlessly thin (looked better a few months post-partum than I look now), nice and really low-key.
The only main requirement of my postdoc is to submit a funding proposal by the end of the academic year for a career development grant. I met up with her and found out she is currently funded by the exact same grant, having gotten it on her first try, which was fantastically helpful and extremely intimidating. Her proposal is extremely well-done. I've not looked at many of these things, but I can really tell hers is exceptionally good. It has coherence and logic: it's an important and central problem, and yet extremely well-defined and manageable, it builds on her areas of expertise, and it comes with a 20 year vision attached. She had a substantial publication list going into the grant application process that shows a variety of projects she can do, and was already junior faculty for several years at the time of submission. I have just my dissertation published, one paper from undergrad, and that's it.
Having read her proposal I have a very clear idea what I could do process-wise to develop it, and yet I feel even more paralyzed than I did before I read it. The most intimidating part: I have 2 months left to produce the grant proposal. She produced the grant proposal 4-5 months early and circulated it widely and got lots of feedback, asked lots of questions to program officer, and that's how she got it on the first try.
Compared with her, I'm a very weak candidate. But I don't have a few years to develop prior to the grant proposal.
The hard part moving forward is swallowing my fear, moving on, and starting to work on it anyhow. I'm definitely not going to succeed if I don't start. And if I don't get this (likely!), I can reuse the material somewhere.
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