granting games
skookumchick | September 14, 2009It is that season again, where NSF-CAREER awards are being announced left right and center. In my world, there are three in particular to celebrate:
Dr. Julie Trenor, assistant professor in the Department of Science and Engineering Education at Clemson University, whose grant is titled "Influence of Social Capital on Under-Represented Engineering Students' Academic and Career Decisions"
Dr. Demetra Evangelou, assistant professor in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University, whose grant is titled "Developmental Engineering: An Examination of Early Learning Experiences as…
sciencewoman | September 5, 2009Let's see if I can remember how to do this blogging thing....
Proposal 1: We started out doing it by the book. Picked a good research topic, and then found the appropriate RFP, with a deadline comfortably in the future. We had weekly brainstorming meetings to refine our research objectives and were just beginning to write some text, when something shook us. Suddenly our experimental design didn't seem quite so clever or practical anymore. We spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out new ways to approach the problem, and debating whether we were really going to go after the RFP after all.…
sciencewoman | August 11, 2009I'm back to working on my class on Experimental Design and Data Analysis. One of my goals for the course is to have students work in groups to write an NSF-style proposal. So I sat down this morning to think about the steps it takes to write a research proposal. When I turned to google, I found a lot of tips on the writing of proposals, but not a lot of tips about how to actually generate the content that goes into the proposals. Since my course focus is how-to-do-science, I'm more interested in the content than the style. (Yes, I'm sure style can make or break a borderline proposal, but if…
sciencewoman | July 13, 2009A few weeks ago, I blogged a self-assessment of my progress towards tenure. It seemed like an apt time to reflect in the hours before my annual review meeting with the department chair(s) and in the months before my packet for reappointment is submitted. Reappointment is the first and only gatekeeping between me and submitting that tenure dossier in three years. I feel OK about reappointment, but less so about tenure. So that's the focus of the navel-gazing. (I suspect such gazing will only get worse as the next few years wend on.)
In my self-assessment, I identified a number of areas where…
skookumchick | June 15, 2009At JAM last week, a really useful session was conducted by Nakeina Douglas, an assistant professor in the L Douglass Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth. She also is involved in the Grace E Harris Leadership Institute, and teaches public policy and research methods.
"What was so useful about her talk?" I hear you ask. Well. Let me tell you. She talked to us about how to write those darn annual reports for NSF. Let me share...
Shockingly, the two main objectives of reporting for NSF are accountability and decision usefulness. I know; who would have…
skookumchick | June 3, 2009I'm heading to Washington DC on Monday for NSF's Joint Annual Meeting (JAM) with our team's poster on our ADVANCE project, and I know Pat of FairerScience will be there, doing her thing about "Why Don't They Listen?". Any other folks out there planning to be at JAM? Perhaps we could have a meet-up? :-) Let me know either by email (alicepawley with Google's mail service) or in the comments...
skookumchick | April 1, 2009I mentioned that one of the things I've been doing for the last little while is preparing for ADVANCE-Purdue's first-year site visit, which we had on Friday March 27. This is the first year NSF has been doing first year site visits for ADVANCE, and considering we've only been funded since October 2008 it seemed a little early to me. However, I think it went off fairly well, and I thought I would share with you some of the details below the fold.
The site visit was 1 day; the NSF program officers flew in to town the night before, and flew out again by 7 pm the next day.
The structure of…
skookumchick | March 19, 2009Okay, so what on earth *have* I been up to, if not blogging? I'm catching you up (rather like the recitative bits in opera - dry, dull, but advancing the action, rather than arias which are beautiful but don't get you anywhere much) with some RBOCs...
As previously mentioned, I had a trip to Washington DC for a symposium on engineering education research. I've uploaded some photos here if you want to see the outcomes of the sticky-note brainstorm (the funnest part of the conference!). I did get a pretty awesome dinner with some attendees:
I submitted an IEECI grant, my first PI…
skookumchick | March 18, 2009So the readers have spoken: one more vote for hearing about my PI experience than the weird convo with the deans.
However, I was working on the draft, and then some more work stuff got dumped on me, then SW had her popular deconstruction of one of Greg Laden's posts and I didn't want to interrupt the flow. But it seems to have petered off, and I'm trying to dig out of my work stuff (next post will be RBOC) and so I'm finally getting back to this.
Here you are, then, and caveat emptor or whatever the bloggy-equivalent is:
Even though I'm co-PI on a big grant (>$3M when all is said and done…
skookumchick | March 3, 2009So I got back Sunday night from a workshop at Arizona State University on Engineering and Science Ethics Education. The goal of the workshop was to explore the possibilities for blending microethics and macroethics in graduate engineering and science education; we spent 2 days talking about the history of such efforts, what micro and macro ethics might mean in the context of scientific and engineering education and practice, and how we might operationalize these ideas into 4 formats: a 3-credit course, a 9-credit course, a lab-situated set of discussions, and some online formats. The…
sciencewoman | October 29, 2008 It's one of those days where it is now almost 4 pm and I have yet to get working on tomorrow morning's lecture. I'm also going to miss a self-imposed deadline to get a draft out to a collaborator. Instead, I spent the morning getting flu shots for Minnow and I and working with a student on a proposal to get a particular dataset for use on his/her thesis. There's a student-only RFP available and we're about 2/3 the way through the proposal. One of the pieces I was helping with involved contacting some other people who might be interested in having the same dataset for their own projects, and…
skookumchick | September 17, 2008The press release for our big grant came out today. I have so far been interviewed by the student paper, and the local NPR station, and I have already learned some things about what not to do in interviews with friendly reporters. Some tips are below that I'll add to over the day, and please share some of your thoughts in the comments.
We wrote some talking points to share with all the main grant members who were more involved in different parts, and may be less prepared about others. Don't forget to read them carefully, annotate them, and add to them BEFORE your press release goes out.…
sciencewoman | September 15, 2008Alice is rolling in the dough (yay Alice!!!!), but ScienceWoman is flat broke, both personally and professionally. The personal is a story for another day, but now's the time to talk about being professionally broke and the implications for my fall research output.
Due to MU's too restrictive policies, I don't have any more start-up funds to cushion the first one to three years of going from post-doc to PI. Last year I wrote two proposals. One got funded. The little one. The total uncommitted money remaining in that account is <$300. So, broke. In fact, this fall I've been paying for…
skookumchick | September 5, 2008Just got word that our NSF-ADVANCE grant that we'd been waiting on was finally funded. W00T!!! Start date of October 1. It's not listed on the NSF website yet, but I'll post the link when it is.
It's $3.9M. The president of the university is the PI, and I'm one of 3 co-PIs. It will fund my research assistants and my major research for 5 years. Not bad for a newbie assistant professor.
I think I'm going to take the evening off.
Updated 9/6/08: the NSF award information and abstract is here.
sciencewoman | August 14, 2008I'm in the midst of going through reviews on a rejected proposal. I got the reviews back in the winter and didn't even seriously look at them until this summer, because it's a yearly RFP and I already had a good idea why I didn't get funded. So mostly, I'm pretty mellow about these reviews. They did a good job at finding the weaknesses in the proposal and giving suggestions for improvement. They all said that the proposal was well written, well organized and addressed an important topic. So, yay me!
But I'd like to take just one moment to whine about one reviewer comment. Because I can, it's…
sciencewoman | February 20, 2008I just found out the the Bush administration's budget proposal for next year zeros out one of the programs that is a significant source of support for my past and proposed research. Hopefully Congress will put it back in, but in the meantime, does anyone have $50K per year they could prop me up with?