That tree in the forest

Analogous to that tree in the forest that falls without anyone hearing it: is it worse to have a grant submitted and then rejected or almost completely written and then NOT submitted because my PI decides that is a bad idea for reasons I cannot share here? To me, the second option feels worse.

When talking to students and post-docs

Dear senior investigators,

When you are invited to give a talk somewhere, and are thus scheduled to have lunch with students and post-docs, PLEASE don’t talk about the following topics:

•          The bad state of the economy

•           The recent sequester

•           How those two things lead to a sad state of funding

•           How that leads to very little job opportunities for students and post-docs that want to stay in academia

•           Oh wait, industry is not much better at the moment

Because really, we have heard that before and to talk about this a couple times a month with different people really doesn’t add to our morale. Please just talk about other stuff, like science, or your hobbies.

On postdoc funding

Bashir has a post up about postdoc funding where he says that it’s weird that it takes a long time (~year) to apply for funding (i.e. the time between applying and hearing whether you’ve got the money) and that it’s hard that funding is rarely for longer than 2-3 years whereas the average postdoc length is more like >5 years. So you either have to stitch several grants together or (like me) be lucky enough that your PI supports you. I am currently applying for grant #5, the previous 4 I didn’t get. 

In the comments Drugmonkey suggests a system in which you can only apply once within the first year after getting your PhD. This is actually exactly the system that the home country funding agency has for handing out postdoc grants, and I don’t really like it for the following reasons:

First, the fact that you have to apply within the first year after your PhD, and the fact that this funding agency looks at CV (meaning: number of papers published) a lot, means that you should preferably wait as long as you can to apply to get as many papers from your PhD out. However, the funding agency also prefers it if you’re not yet at your host lab when you submit your grant, meaning that the only way around this is to stick around in your PhD lab for another year (or take a looooong time getting your PhD so that most of your papers are already published). I’m not so sure if that’s something you want to encourage.

Second, I think the transition between PhD and postdoc is the best time to switch fields or learn a new technique. When you choose the lab to do your PhD in, you may not be aware of your interests, or all the techniques that you can learn. Or you may switch interests during the course of you PhD. And during your postdoc you should form ideas about what you want to do when you have your own lab, so that doesn’t seem like a point in your career to make any dramatic changes to what you’re doing (or am I wrong? Please discuss!). However, if you need to learn a new technique (like I did, I only started doing slice electrophysiology during my postdoc), it’s very difficult to write a grant about experiments when you don’t have a clear idea what exactly those experiments are and how much time they will take. So a grant like this will either favor people who stay in their field and keep doing what they know or people who’s PI writes their grants for them. I’m not sure that is something you want to encourage either.

Also, being able to apply only once takes away the opportunity to learn from the review comments and improve your proposal in a next round.

Anyway, this comes from someone who thought that she had very strategically waited to apply for this grant until the last possibly option for her (a year after defending my PhD), because by then she had most of her papers from grad school published. However, then the government of the home country decided that this round of said grant was going to be the last, so all of a sudden many more people applied but they only handed out the same number of grants, meaning that the funding rate dropped to about half of what it normally is. Next round they said:”Haha we were just kidding, here is another round of this same grant”. So I may be a bit disgruntled about this.

Who gets to worry most?

For some reason the past week has been full of pessimistic (or realistic) remarks about how bleak the funding situation is. First, my PI was announcing at lab meeting that the two big R01s that the lab has will end next year (that was not new to me, but it was to some of the lab) and that it’s unsure whether they will be successfully renewed. Then, he told us about how if the US government has not determined a new budget in Januari, NIH may cut, even in existing grants. I didn’t know how that worked, so I asked DrugMonkey on twitter, who explained that indeed the NIH can do that, but that Obama promised it wouldn’t happen (if I have time I will embed those tweets later).

Same day, I got an email from the Society for Neuroscience asking their members to oppose sequestration (and they have a webinar about what it is too). And then today we had a seminar speaker who at lunch started to talk about how the current environment is not very good for young scientists in terms of money. Oh and a home country paper talked about how some of the grants from the home country’s scientific organization only have a 5% funding rate….

So at lab meeting we were talking about who gets to worry most. One of my post-doc colleagues has a husband with a good job, so she is last in the line of worrying about her job. I come next, because Dr. BrownEyes and I both have jobs, but they’re both in science. And the one who gets to worry most is my post-doc colleague who is single. For now, this is how I approach this: