What a $500k grant proposal looks like

Re:What a $500k grant proposal looks like by lumost on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @09:31PM (#30449566)

I'd be curious what the impact of fewer but more voluminous grants would be on academia. As other commenters have noted this grant turns into roughly 1 student for 5 years working on the project for a professor. Even for this grant, you would expect that a professor would need 3-5 such ongoing grants to really keep the lab functional.

It took 2 weeks to craft this grant proposal. Assuming the average academic has a 30% hit rate and the average grant provides funding for ~1 year... then this translates to roughly 30 weeks per year. A somewhat extreme example, but I wouldn't be surprised if these numbers get worse as you move to lower tier universities - and better for higher tier universities.

Would it be better to simply grant lab's to researchers with a general research plan on a 3-5 year cadence?

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Re:What a $500k grant proposal looks like by the_snooze on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @09:50PM (#30449665)

There are indeed larger grant programs. Those tend to be collaborative affairs. You have multiple PIs across different institutes going in on the same submission. Each person contributes a piece of a larger (hopefully cohesive) whole. It's generally less work per person compared to a solo submission for a smaller pot, but it's one of those cases where it's crucial to have established working relationships in your research community.

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Re:What a $500k grant proposal looks like by zozbot234 on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @09:49PM (#30449661)

More voluminous grants would be riskier and harder to evaluate, AIUI. As of today, the idea is that a grant functions both as a prize for having a competitive proposal in the first place, and as a wager on behalf of broader society on the actual research impact. So yes, grant proposals take time to craft but that's just part of the game, and arguably of the actual research that you'll be doing.

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Re:What a $500k grant proposal looks like by lumost on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @10:54PM (#30450024)

possible, and an employee who doesn't know if they'll have a job next week might also work harder - at least for a time.

We are already taking the societal risk of employing a professor and giving them grant money - at least we can get the productive side of the money we spend.

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Re:What a $500k grant proposal looks like by thrownawayalre on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @09:53PM (#30449682)

In many fields, students do not need extra grants for funding. Startup funds, teaching assistantship (TA) and other sources fund PhD students. You can advise 3-5 students who TA at the same time, without writing grants. Some fields on the other hand need more external grants to fund students. It really is field-dependent.

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Re:What a $500k grant proposal looks like by Fomite on Thursday February 24, 2022 @01:23AM (#30451203)

This.

A mentor of mine is able to fund most of her students, save for maybe their final year, on TA-shps.

I'm in a purely research department - if I don't have funding for the full time, I don't have students.

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Re:What a $500k grant proposal looks like by dsqrt on Thursday February 24, 2022 @08:59AM (#30454715)

Most of the federal grants I am aware of have duration of 3+ year (the typical duration of a PhD after having completed the course work).

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