Wednesday, November 26, 2008

The Funding Cycle

Most of the last week was spent working on an NSF grant proposal. (By the way, does anyone know why they kept the pdf and txt format of the call, but removed the html? That was annoying as I was trying to figure out exactly how many colons my title needed to meet government standards.) I don't have any really entertaining stories about it. That's just how I was spending too much of my time. November 28 is a funny day to have deadline, though. For us, that translated into a submission deadline of yesterday. (Is your Sponsored Research Office really open on the 28th?) Next deadline (for small grants) is December 17, and I plan to get a proposal in for that as well.

I try not to continuously send in NSF proposals, but it's seemed like that's the way it's been going recently. I'd prefer to metaphorically let the tank get close to empty as far as funds go, then apply and refill the tank, so I could spend less effort on the grant process. But there's ever-growing competition, and smaller amounts available. And given the long lag between calls, and the high risk factor each year, I feel the need to be more proactive than even a few years back. Especially with the economy tanking, so I'm not clear if corporate money will be available in the coming year.

Anyhow, since a proposal did go in yesterday, I can relax over the holiday weekend. I hope all of you will be as well.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

that is kind of funny, because we have a deadline today (27) in lithuania for the lithuanian state science and studies foundation projects :-) we've just submitted a project ;-) time to get some sleep.