Grant applications

I've never really applied for a biggish grant. I found an announcement and a senior person to work with me on a pre-proposal. We planned a collaboration with some of the senior person's colleagues.

Only one application was allowed per area and a few days before the deadline we found out about another group in the area and for various reasons we had to collaborate rather than compete. During a couple of hours of conference calls, we spoke about exactly how we would merge the two studies. The "merged" pre-proposal was submitted with no mention of us and not even showed to us in advance. Even more egregiously, the merged application requests funding --- and this is a full third of the requested budget --- for a role that I would have done for free, and in an area where frankly I have far more cutting-edge knowledge, albeit less experience.

Their way of telling us that they don't want to work with us was by sending to us their pre-proposal a few days after it's been handed in and having us notice that there's no mention of our participation.


Reassuring update: I forwarded the pre-proposal to someone who wasn't included on the recipient list, a pretty senior person. I phrased it neutrally, "Even after our conversations with them last week, I'm not sure exactly what they have in mind, but wanted to make sure you had the pre-proposal."

The reply: apparently they don't play well with others.

Well said! Still royally rotten of them.

The demographic game

A close friend from college just broke up with her boyfriend of 10 years, her first long relationship. She's a slightly aimless grad student, cute but could be more confident. He's cute, dresses well, and has a tenure-track job at a good school. It seems so transparent.

Relationships are such a demographic game. When you get involved in college or right after you don't know who is going to be successful and who not, so it's easier to pair off by personality. As success becomes more clear, people seem more and more conscious of their "worth" in the marketplace.

It's not my relationship, and I wasn't even sure I thought it was the best relationship, but for some reason this depresses me.

Why I love Boice

I was feeling disconsolate the other day, so looked up depression in the index of Boice. He had practically a whole chapter in the first half of the book, the teaching half that I never look at. He says that the first year out of grad school in a real job is a time when faculty feel more depressed and listless than at perhaps any time in their lives. I would add, all the more so for postdocs because we don't even have much real place in the university, as in the recent PhD Comics. It made me feel so much better to read that I was not alone and that it was actually normal to feel abnormal!

Boice is right every time. I am starting new projects and still have a couple weighing on me from before, and I feel a tremendous amount of pressure to start churning everything out. In other words, this is the typical rushing impatience alternating with despair that leads me to watching the past 3 days' of both the Daily Show and Colbert Report instead of working. But when I think about even Monday or the end of the month, I'm not sure how I will have enough work done for those times.

There's a balance between solo work and collaborations. There are two or more projects closely enough related to my dissertation that it feels like I could churn them out one week each and get good journal placement, although I know that is the rushing impatience that Boice warns against talking. Review article on a subject related to my dissertation. Again, seems easy. And a couple old projects that I'm going to ignore.

And then collaborations. The only successful one is a grant pre-proposal: I saw a notice for funding, wrote a pre-proposal for the first time with no idea, and she said it was good, so I accomplished something here that wasn't my dissertation. And then a couple potential collaborations whom if I am working with I need to start some momentum, hard especially with the holidays.

I have to keep reminding myself to breathe and just allow work to proceed one hour at a time, and one step at a time. I wrote down two steps and did those, just like I'm supposed to. And now I want to write down that step 3 is "Do everything else." But I will breathe again and take another step. Impatience is hard.

And also hard is that I feel such a pressure (from whom? my advisor? "people around here"?) to juggle more and more balls, and in theory I see how all of them can be juggled by someone else. I just feel like I have trouble doing even one project. But I will start one project and feel like I have a little momentum on it before I move to something else.

Perils of soft money

A faculty member who I had thought of a well-established is leaving the university soon because they got sick and couldn't work full-time anymore. They are moving partway across the country to a mid-rank school that I didn't even know had an appropriate program. The announcement said they would be able to continue in academia in a "highly supportive environment and yet not be obligated at the same level [as] here."

Presumably they could no longer pay for their soft money position, and the new position will pay their salary.

What a horrifying position to be in.

Miracle of the phone

I got an email from the senior member of a rival research group about a published paper. He had several detailed questions, clearly pasted in from a Word document complete with sub-items (a, b, c, d) and bold font for the item titles. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach because he asked straight out whether one of the numbers was correct because it seemed high to him, and I remembered why it might not be correct.

I spent over four hours going back over my paper, pulled up all the programming again, and discovered the mistake that I had suspected. That one number was too high by one because of a programming oversight. No other numbers were off and it doesn't change the primary or even secondary results of the paper because I'm interested in differences, and even after being corrected, my number would still seem "high" so qualitatively my results are the same.

It made me nervous to admit the mistake to a rival especially when I'm on the job market so being scrutinized. I also felt weird sending him exact details in writing because I know that they have enough people in their group that if they wanted to, they could replicate my paper quickly and perhaps discover errors that I hadn't seen. I'll submit a correction to that one number to the journal once I'm done with the job market, but the correction will have no practical effect on anyone's future work and could have a negative impact on me.

Most of the questions were just details about definitions, and so I wrote up my answers to all the questions and dallied over sending it. Then I realized the phone exists. Thank you, Alexander Graham Bell!

I called him up and answered all his questions. For the one answer where I am off by one, I told him how I defined the quantity, a bit different than most, and then gave an argument for why the answer should be "high" since it really is high both as published and once corrected.

He said, "Oh!" like he hadn't thought of my answer why it was plausible. He agreed that it made sense, and he seemed sincerely satisfied by that answer. And his qualitative understanding will be exactly the same if he finds out it is really x-1 instead of x.

And then I got to find out about their group's newest research, and I even gave him a tip that I think could really help them.

Beyond the lesson about the phone being oh so useful, it's really nice to realize that no matter how quantitative you get, people think qualitatively. Someone is short, average height, or tall, and even if their height is off by a few inches they probably wouldn't change categories. Likewise, my answer was "high", and qualitatively it didn't make a difference whether it was n or n-1.

What not to say on a date: obese version

I went on a date with a guy who turned out to be not merely obese, but the kind of obese where the stomach starts to droop over the genitals, definitely on the way to morbid obesity, if not already there.

He had dropped some TMI in an email saying he doesn't drink alcohol (he'll tell me later).

He didn't do anything that weekend other than get his oil changed --- he couldn't at least make something up? --- and he didn't seem to have any hobbies, so for 40 minutes we swapped pet and family stories. He told me about his job as a professional nay-sayer at a phone company, his siblings, his dog, his siblings' dog, and his dog's siblings.

The dog was good because the dog helped his father with his sleep apnea by waking him up whenever he stopped breathing. Dog's definitely better than a CPAP machine. Which his doctors want him to have because he has sleep apnea too. Getting diagnosed was a real pain. After two years of constant headaches, he had to sleep one night in a lab tethered to machines, and during the one hour he actually slept in the lab, he stopped breathing 6 times. Anyhow, all the medications he has to take are incompatible with alcohol, thus fulfilling his promise to explain why he doesn't drink alcohol. So he's willing to take pills, but he draws the line at a CPAP machine. Or, apparently, weight loss surgery.

Poor guy. He probably thinks I'm not interested just because he's obese, rather than because he is both obese and boring.

I surrender to the job market.

It happens this way every year. I tell myself that I'm not going to go on the job market, except for really exceptional positions. This year, I just sent two applications, one of which was solicited directly by the school.

And then I ran across one at a fantastic small liberal arts college, one that I almost attended for undergraduate in fact, so I have had a bit of a crush on the college for a long time (if such a thing is possible). So I applied there. And then to two more comparably-ranked small colleges, both in barely-tolerable locations; I think I met a guy at a conference who used to have one of those jobs. The web form asked if I had department contacts. I didn't know whether to list him, but I figured I may as well. So now a total of five applications.

And the idea of earning a real salary next year in a tenure-track job, especially in the wake of unknown economic turmoil, sounds really good. So I've identified a sixth job. And then I'll go into an orgy of professional association and job listing websites, which I'm guessing will culminate in a total of 20 applications.

So I need to open up a new excel file to list everything. Which I was convinced wasn't going to happen.

Anything to avoid real work.