Sunday, October 16, 2016

Proposal Submission Complaints

I spend so much time filling out and correcting ancillary files for my proposals that I don't actually have time to actually write the research strategy/project description.

Folks at other places, do you write your own consortium arrangement, consortium justification, budget justification, etc.? If there is a mistake found by your grant admin, do they correct it or do you have to fix it and send them the corrected version no matter how small or unimportant the change?

3 comments:

  1. Depends. If my research staff are super busy then they are less likely to help. But mostly they do my budget justification etc and correct my numbers in the excel sheet etc.

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  2. I do everything myself. The dept level admin is overwhelmed so I don't have the heart to pile on when I can do the thing myself just as well or better (we are understaffed); the college level admin mostly gives me the stink eye for always being late w/ respect to their week-ahead polity and tells me to fix stuff when she catches something that's off.

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  3. Funny story (not ha-ha funny, more like sob-funny). I uploaded the boilerplate 2 weeks in advance and gave all admins the ability to view and edit the NSF record. Sent them extra emails notifying them they can look at the whole thing. Then the day of submission, dept level admin all of a sudden wants to change the budget, so we scramble. And the college level admin puts a snarky note in internal routing document (never communicates to me) that she allowed the proposal to go with two letters of support (they are now considered nonstandard parts of proposals and while allowed they are no longer encouraged) because I was late. What pisses me off to no end is that they want, for their convenience, to look at the whole thing only once, click on a few buttons and submit. If everything by technical narrative and project summary is up eons before the deadline, they just don't want to look at it. It's as if I am here for them and not the other way around. FFS.

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