Day 626: Back to "work"
Dec. 2nd, 2021 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeToday I "leaped" back into action on the grant proposal scene. The way we get funded at work is to write grant proposals to NIH (the National Institutes of Health), which get peer-reviewed several months later, and scored, and then the agency makes its funding decisions, and then - if you're very lucky - 9 months after you submit it, you get funded. Less than 10% of them do get funded, and we only get salaries if we're funded. Most of the time, funding is only for maybe 20% FTE, too. (And we only get benefits if we're at 50% FTE.)
Anyway, my current hope is to get a proposal funded for creating an online program to help adults who want to quit e-cigarettes. We've submitted versions of it, hm, I think four times now. The first three got pretty good scores but didn't get funded. Then we made the proposal a bit fancier and tried again, and we got a worse score, which is quite exasperating because, urgh, the reviewers made a bunch of sloppy mistakes.*
Today I got the idea to use a bit of internal funding to do the first two stages of the study. It would be a pretty low-budget version, but the reviewers don't care about those stages anyway, and completing a version of them first would make the rest of it more solid, I think.
I would much rather keep working on the papers I'm writing, instead of having to suddenly do a new study without any compensation for my time, but it's probably either that or just give up.
* For example, we'd be using this special technique called EMA. One of my colleagues is an expert in EMA; she's used it in several large-scale studies and even gets paid to consult with other organizations on how to do it. She'd be in charge of doing it in our study. We also added a grad student at another university to "consult" with us, because she's done some EMA too, specifically in the population we'd be working with. The idea is that our person would mentor this person. We say this clearly in several places - we have an in-house expert (which we explain in detail), and we'd also give this grad student some more experience and mentorship. That was supposed to be a selling point, and our NIH contact person was quite enthusiastic about it. But TWO of the three reviewers misunderstood and criticized us for using the grad student as our "expert"!
Anyway, my current hope is to get a proposal funded for creating an online program to help adults who want to quit e-cigarettes. We've submitted versions of it, hm, I think four times now. The first three got pretty good scores but didn't get funded. Then we made the proposal a bit fancier and tried again, and we got a worse score, which is quite exasperating because, urgh, the reviewers made a bunch of sloppy mistakes.*
Today I got the idea to use a bit of internal funding to do the first two stages of the study. It would be a pretty low-budget version, but the reviewers don't care about those stages anyway, and completing a version of them first would make the rest of it more solid, I think.
I would much rather keep working on the papers I'm writing, instead of having to suddenly do a new study without any compensation for my time, but it's probably either that or just give up.
* For example, we'd be using this special technique called EMA. One of my colleagues is an expert in EMA; she's used it in several large-scale studies and even gets paid to consult with other organizations on how to do it. She'd be in charge of doing it in our study. We also added a grad student at another university to "consult" with us, because she's done some EMA too, specifically in the population we'd be working with. The idea is that our person would mentor this person. We say this clearly in several places - we have an in-house expert (which we explain in detail), and we'd also give this grad student some more experience and mentorship. That was supposed to be a selling point, and our NIH contact person was quite enthusiastic about it. But TWO of the three reviewers misunderstood and criticized us for using the grad student as our "expert"!