Julian Bleecker

Aouch. They were kind considering the commentary I have seen floating around on other people's reviews. NSF wants proposals that are mini-research projects to get together and VERY time consuming. It is best to have a co-PI who has already been funded in the past and/or is a seasoned scientist so he/she can be a hardass on critiquing what you write before submitting.

I am not trying to be smart ass given the fact that I have never written one that has been funded myself but I have observed many successes and failures from friends of mine who do this thing for a living. A very amazing lady (Maxine Brown) who wrote (and received) a large part of most multi-million dollar NSF proposals from my previous lab at UIC, had an interesting acronym devised that I am looking up for you...

I think that no matter how critical and snooty you think you can be of you proposal, someone can be more so it helps to pass it around.

It is brave to see you put it all out there but I must say that you're getting rejected from the really hard to get into pockets of the universe where they may often break you before you decide to resubmit...

Don't break down Julian! Re-group, revise and resubmit. NSF projects are like trying to get a PhD every time. Weren't you scared enough the first time?

(sigh)

This is why I don't have the heart yet to attempt a tenure-track teaching position...I didn't have any pressure to perform anywhere else other than the classroom when I taught for four years as an adjunct.

I'm not even close to upset or breaking down. I'm doing this as a pedagogical action for students and others who have never been through this process, and trying to add a bit of humor to it at the same time. I'm not "on the couch" here. Rather, I'm trying to add some transparency to a typically cloaked practice. You only hear about people who get grants, rarely from those who don't get them, and almost never do we see the reviewers notes, one reason why anonymous reviewers (kind of like the anonymous internet) feel like they can say unhelpful, unpolite, and decidedly non-collegial things.

One of the most important aspects of professional life is getting people enrolled in your circuit of thoughts and get them to support you, whether financially or politically or just by allowing you to present your work. That often times means you have to enter the world of the submission review process, something that's a bit of a mystery to most of us. By making this stuff public, I'm hoping to give a sense as to how it works.

It's this year's meme — kind of like my post on why it's important to publish your design ephemera. Making things public is serious business.

http://research.techkwondo.com/blog/julian/173

So, I'm perfectly fine, but..thanks for the concern!

;)

Ok then. No couch for you! It is hard to read cold text sometimes. We read our own melodrama into it.

This is all helpful. It is true that the system in place rewards success and not failure (a.k.a. effort). We like to stick that under the rug...

In parallel, since the Olympic Games start soon, I am reminded that in ancient times, only 1st place winner was rewarded but anyone who was young, male and swore he had practiced for 10 months before signing up was eligible for the race...

Now we have second place, and third place and how you qualify seems a bit more complicated. Now we have professionals instead of amateurs.

Getting an NSF proposal funded is unfortunately like competing against ugly child of both modern and ancient Olympics...

How gentle do you think our students or us would be against each other under an anonymous review? Which brings us to that whole peer review thing...(cough)

Here's Maxine's statement from a panel in Siggraph '97.

POSITION STATEMENT
There are several stages in the successful grant proposal process: inspiration, communication, perspiration, implementation, and continuation. In my environment, this work is shared among many, but that truly depends on the size and nature of the grant.

INSPIRATION, or vision, is the unique idea you want funded.

COMMUNICATION with program officers at funding agencies let's you know whether they will fund your ideas. Clearly, there has to be strong interest in the types of work you propose and the types of programs they want to fund. Ongoing communication with your program officers, as well as an awareness of current programs, will help you focus your ideas.

PERSPIRATION comes from your hard work to meet proposal submission deadlines; you need to put your ideas into clear, concise English, define needed resources, develop a reasonable budget, obtain cost sharing, and getletters of support. Most important -- answer the questions in the RFPs (request for proposals). The only way reviewers can judge the merits of your proposal and compare them with others is if you all follow the same requested format.

IMPLEMENTATION happens when you get funded! Obtain requested
resources,implement your vision, and produce results. Don't procrastinate! Results are measured in papers published, conference presentations given, students who obtain degrees, and further funding (leverage). Funding agencies request annual reports, so keep a record of all your successes to date and submit them annually for review. It's okay to report successes as well as failures, for knowing what doesn't work (and why) is as important as knowing what does work. Use this information to develop new theories to test and transfer technology back to equipment vendors and researchers at collaborating institutions.

CONTINUATION of your theories and ideas leads to new funding opportunities, new grants, new students, and new successes.

***

Maxine D. Brown is the associate director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, responsible for
the funding, documentation, and promotion of its research activities. She
is also the associate director for Marketing Communications at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Research interests include virtual environments, scientific visualization, new methodologies for informal science and engineering education,
paradigms for information display, algorithm optimization for scalable
computing, sonification, multimedia, and collaborative communication
technologies.