10 ms·

What a $500k grant proposal looks like

293 points by azhenley 5y ago

anonymousDan 5y ago
As faculty in the UK on the receiving end of the current pension cuts that little voice telling me to leave for industry while I still can only gets louder when I hear about people jumping ship like the OP...
- wanderer_ 5y ago
  [Tangent] Educators just aren't as valued as they used to be. This is a significant issue in my family, as I come from a clan full of teachers of many types.
tomrod 5y ago
> My university took a whooping 53% for overhead. Highway robbery. I love these kinds of breakdowns. It's very useful to help communicate successful models in people's crafts.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  I wonder how the university gets to the 53% overhead figure. Do they have a fully costed internal accounting of things like "rent" for lab space and share of administrators' time/salary?
  - AmazThrowAway 5y ago
    They have a shockingly detailed model that they negotiate with the federal government ! https://cfo.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/facilities_and_administrative_costs_overview_mar2016.pdf https://cfo.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/facilities_and_...
    - monkeybutton 5y ago
      Wow! Shockingly detailed is not an overstatement.
    - wanderer_ 5y ago
      It seems theirs is even higher (57%).
  - ordersofmag 5y ago
    Yes. Cost of space, cost of power, cost of business office staff to process the paychecks, cost of a bunch of CPA and auditors to make sure you're following all the federal regulations about how the money can be spend, cost of IT to provide WiFi and network jacks and bandwidth, cost of water in the water fountain, etc, etc.... At institutions where a large fraction of the work going on is grant funded if you didn't do it this way you can't really make your institutional budget balance. And 53% is actually pretty low compared to many institutions. Source: I've been 100% grant funded the last 20 years of my career and have been involved in writing 100's of federal research grants.
    - yazaddaruvala 5y ago
      > Cost of space, cost of power, cost of IT to provide WiFi and network jacks and bandwidth, cost of water in the water fountain Time to move to a WeWork? WeWork All Access - $3600/year. Or at home for "free" if no real lab is needed. > cost of business office staff to process the paychecks Time to move to Direct Deposit? For a grand total of $0! > cost of a bunch of CPA and auditors to make sure you're following all the federal regulations about how the money can be spend Let them spend it however for free? or hire a CPA for a couple days. No need for $173k worth of CPA time per grant. > At institutions where a large fraction of the work going on is grant funded if you didn't do it this way you can't really make your institutional budget balance. Based on the math, they either need to invest into automation or it seems like a dying industry.
      - edmundsauto 5y ago
        I think it’s your expectations that are out of whack. There is sticker shock, but pretty much everywhere else is higher. Also, do you know what a clusterfuck it is if someone screws up accounting, payroll, or legal? Those systems are Byzantine and you really do need an expert to navigate them legally. Institutions don’t take the risk that an individual might take.
      - Fomite 5y ago
        My institution employs about 7000 people. I'm interested if there's a single company that employs that many people you can point to that pays $0 to handle payroll.
- AmazThrowAway 5y ago
  I'm very curious if this number is actually correct; in my experience "53%" overhead means the university adds a $0.53 "tax" on each dollar you spend, which works out to the university "taking" ~35% of the total amount. Still high, but not as high as I used to think.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
glofish 5y ago
also noteworthy elements: university overhead 53%, so that leaves $250K. Over five years that works out to basically $50K/year That needs to cover 1 month summer salary plus the salary and the tuition for a single student, and the travel to conferences, and the experiment ... and that is a "prestigious" CAREER award only few people get ... no wonder the author jumped ship
- the_snooze 5y ago
  At my institute, that's not how overhead is calculated. Overhead is a percentage of what the PI is budgeted for. So for a $500K grant, 53% overhead really means about 34.6% of $500K. The university's cut is $173K, which is 53% of the PI's budget of $327K.
- lazyjeff 5y ago
  Actually the math doesn't work quite like that, but it's a common misconception. 53% indirect costs (overhead) is multiplied on the direct costs rather than the total amount, so it is actually 500K-500K/(1+0.53) = 173K taken by the university assuming the full amount can be charged indirect. In practice, some charges like tuition and equipment do not have indirects, so the actual amount taken by the university would be about 135K +- 35K out of the 500K. So you get about 365K of direct spendable money from the 500K if the overhead rate is 53% (as it is at the University of Tennessee where the author was). The indirect cost rate is decided by the federal government based on data by the universities, so it's accounted for in the grant award amounts. So it's not as nefarious as it sounds.
  - javiramos 5y ago
    Point is the same
  - ta988 5y ago
    And most of the time (if not always with NIH) when researchers say they got a $x grant, x is the direct cost so what they get directly. then you can often negotiate things back from your university such as time on shared equipments, students...
countvonbalzac 5y ago
I am not in academia but the 53% overhead to an outsider is absurd! Probably the same reason tuition has gotten so high, someone has to pay for all those deans, vice deans and vice vice deans!
- light_hue_1 5y ago
  Compared to industry? That's very low! Universities are cheap. 53% overhead works out to be 34% of the total money. I've written grants with many industrial partners (companies you would recognize). All have had much higher overhead rates. Normally these rates are kept secret, but here's a fun memo from the Federal Transit Administration talking about 127% overhead rates! https://www.transit.dot.gov/funding/procurement/third-party-procurement/overhead-rates https://www.transit.dot.gov/funding/procurement/third-party-... The DoD gives as an example a rate of 125%! > For example, in recovering the indirect costs associated with particular contracts during the year, each dollar of engineering direct labor worked on a contract is burdened with an engineering overhead of 125.95 percent. https://www.dhg.com/portals/0/headers/industries/government-contracting/fundamentals-of-government-contracting-webinars/Navigating-the-Sea-of-Overhead-Reference-Documents.pdf https://www.dhg.com/portals/0/headers/industries/government-... This puts universities in some context: https://www.healthra.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Nature_Keeping-the-Lights-On-Article.pdf https://www.healthra.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Nature_K... You'll see that non-profits and hospitals tend to have far higher rates. This doesn't include industry though. Which would be far higher.
  - Anechoic 5y ago
    The DoD gives as an example a rate of 125%! For DOT engineering design firms and environmental firms, a typical overhead rate is 165%-ish, I've seen ranges from 125% to 250%. Over 180% is considered "high".
- sndean 5y ago
  I've heard Harvard's is/was 96%? Or at least that was for a NIH R01-seeking person there in ~biochemistry in 2015. Where I'm at it's probably around 100% but I really don't want to know. We're all expensive.
908B64B197 5y ago
If you read the proposal, the 8th section is the forced diversity statement and goal. I was expecting it to be a little bit more obvious.
- ordersofmag 5y ago
  The 'Broader Impacts' section the proposal is a required element for all National Science Foundation proposals (like this one). It need not be about diversity but you need to articulate how your proposed work has "potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes." So certainly it's forced. In the same way demonstrating the Intellectual Merit of your work is also forced (that being the other criteria against which the proposal is going to be judged).
- ModernMech 5y ago
  Researchers should absolutely be required to ruminate on the broader public impacts of their research when requesting vast sums of money from the public. I once heard a researcher on NPR being interviewed about the ethical considerations of Deep Fake research and their answer was (parphrased) "I don't think about these things, I just do the science. The ethical impacts are for others to think about" and I jaw hit the floor. Today we see the unintended consequences of various technologies finding confluence in the public sphere, and the impacts are reverberating across society. Now more than ever researchers have to be cognizant of the broader societal impacts of their work.
xwdv 5y ago
Nothing in this proposal should take 5 years. For $250k you can easily do this research in a single focused year probably. I imagine researchers must actually be doing multiple grants in parallel or have other main jobs to earn decent money because if they only do this one thing at a time I have no idea why someone would choose this life of poverty when they could be making solid six figures building practical things.
- rsfern 5y ago
  A lot of the work involves training PhD students to do the research, it’s a big component particularly for NSF funding. So it’s not just the raw research output And yeah, most professors try to have multiple programs going. This one would have funded one student for a few years
- ordersofmag 5y ago
  Folks submitting Career grants already have nominally full-time time jobs as faculty with corresponding full-time salaries. The jobs are usually termed '9-month' appointments to allow them time in the summer to get paid for research. So the 5 year timeline reflects that this is not most of what they are doing. Certainly if you have CS background and you're mostly interested in making money this is not the career path for you.
- amcoastal 5y ago
  Yeah, but that's the way these things go. The people working on this project are working on 5 other ones as well. It would be nice to work on fewer research projects at once but the way these grants work (check out the low total amount), its generally unfeasible. Its sort of laughable extremely hard to get grants from the NSF, DoD etc. wouldn't even pay 2 typical FAANG SE 1 year FTE.
  - lumost 5y ago
    I do wonder why academics don't open up research collabs with industrial engineers more frequently (without the corporation involvement). I can think of a half dozen academic research problems which are bottle necked on coding.
danielmorozoff 5y ago
Having written NSF grants and other grants - DARPA etc. I have won some and lost many. I compiled a few non obvious takeaways: - Story telling is everything. It seems this is a huge lesson never taught in grad school. - Technical details sometimes work against you. The author is absolutely right that getting the general thought process across is crucial. - Who you get on your review committee tends to significantly skew the outcome. Can make or break your chances. - I have known a lot of groundbreaking work funded by other money for these exact reasons. Sometimes good science is too far afield for people to understand. An anecdote i like from recent times is how Eric Betzig built the super res microscope. Here's the background. https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/04/quitting-failures-a-microscope-in-the-living-room-nobel-prize/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/04/quitting-failures-a-... TLDR: he won the Nobel... The sad truth is $500k for a career grant seems like a lot when you're in the university, but when you get out and see where else money is being spent you realize how poor academia really is.
- zzz95 5y ago
  The takeaways are very true. I would go further to say that not only is the story telling and the scientific vision a very important part of the sell, the language and terminology needs to be in sync with the reviewers. Often times researchers write very technical details in the proposal that is hard to parse and backfires. In non-blind proposals, pre-communication is the key.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  > The sad truth is $500k for a career grant seems like a lot when you're in the university, but when you get out and see where else money is being spent you realize how poor academia really is. It's not just about the $500k, it's about the freedom to do your project your way from start to finish. I can't get $500k from any investors to do my work; their number one question is what's their ROI, which is not even in the universe of my concerns. The last thing I ever want to think about is how to profit from my research. Another choice is to join a company and then convince that company my idea is worth while. If I get the greenlight to go ahead that's great, but then I'm still always living under the threat of being fired or the project getting canned. Any University is happy to have a CAREER recipient, and your award is portable between institutions. And sure you'd possibly be able to convince your company to sponsor a project you're interested in leading, but the for something like $500k you'd better have a good business case for it, and I can't imagine them approving something that would last 5 years unless it really aligns with their business goals. In order to get the clout to actually ask for this kind of project you'd also need to be at the company for a while, whereas something like a CAREER award is intended for early-career faculty. Imagine going up to your boss and saying: "You know that job you hired me for? I'd like you to keep paying me my regular salary, but I'd also like $500k to work on my own pet project about 70% of the time from September to May, and 100% over the summer. Oh, and I'd like to do this for the next 5 years."
supernova87a 5y ago
You know, the thing I always found extremely frustrating or non-transparent about the academic grant process (and it leaks over into government / NSF / etc applications by the nature of who evaluates those: academics again) is how much unofficial or unspoken criteria come into it. You get extra credit points if you're active in visiting other universities and giving talks on the annual job circuit. You tend to do well if you advisors are well-connected. You have to sprinkle a bit of fad-ish topics into your research if even if it's a stretch to do so. I suppose that it has always been so. And now looking back, I don't find huge fault in that you should be able to connect your research with larger ideas. Or that people in richer environments with more information are generally more successful. But having tried to be on the faculty track before, from a middle-tier university, I never knew these things. Or the professors I was around never told me those unofficial factors. And I thought it very unfair that the judges allowed those factors to creep into their consideration without making it clear to everyone that those were important. If giving talks in person is important, tell people at least. I naively (I guess) thought that the strength of what you wrote in the application/grant document dominated. Maybe it does for some fields or if reviewers are diligent about understanding the blinders they wear and their availability bias. Well, anyway, I left the field all the same. No regrets, but I wish these fields would improve their explicit processes about it. I do note with some amusement now in industry, that basically I am able to approve spending of $500k for certain things with approximately a 30 minute conversation with leadership (with appropriate justification and documentation)...
- derbOac 5y ago
  I went to a grant writing workshop sponsored by the university. When I got there the entire thing, and I mean entire thing, was about buttering up the grant review officers, how to network with people at the agencies, how to work your way into being their friends, and so forth. Not a single thing about the writing process, or how to frame your ideas, or anything like that. I know that's not how grants are always awarded, but as a junior faculty member it's hard to know what to make of that, when a university-sponsored workshop is structured around those issues. It's difficult for me to wrap my head around this all most of the time, to convey to an outsider what bothers me so much about the whole thing, or to even articulate it to myself. I can make comparisons to certain things (Theranos, cryptocurrencies, or economic bubbles) but it's very abstract and fuzzy and imperfect. So much of it seems empty to me, or false.
c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
I was involved in writing a grant relating to product development (Singapore has a SG$250k grant for developing product prototypes). Between 5 colleagues, I estimate there was a bare minimum of 300 hours of work... the application itself, multiple rounds of follow ups and justifications, documentation/receipts on how money was spent, etc.
hammock 5y ago
What is an "education plan" in the context of a grant proposal?
- rsfern 5y ago
  I thought it would mostly be training grad students, but they did a great job weaving the program into their undergrad courses and like professional outreach. That section of the proposal is super skimmable, each paragraph has a pithy bold summary header!
  - hammock 5y ago
    I'm guessing the idea is all grant research should serve some educational purpose for the grad students- is that the idea ?
- Fomite 5y ago
  The NSF heavily pushes the idea that there should be a mentorship and teaching component to most/all of their funded proposals.
deater 5y ago
as someone who couldn't manage getting hired by an R1 university, and also had three NSF CAREER proposals rejected, it's a bit sobering to see someone get it all so easily and then walk away from it. Not that I necessarily blame him, fairly burnt out on academia myself currently. Not getting a CAREER award can really set one back, both in time wasted applying but then having to compete with those who have them. I often felt like the NSF asks for so much these days, including excessive (and possibly unrealistic amounts of) K-12 outreach. I am always curious if you go back after 5 years, how many of the winners actually did everything they promised in the proposal.
- lumost 5y ago
  If there is no measurement, or limited enforcement - then I'd bet it's approximately equal to one or two visits. Whenever someone tacks on way more requirements than could possibly be met, there is a natural prioritization. If after 5 years you didn't deliver on the core idea - then the NSF probably won't care that you completed all of the k-12 outreach. If you hit the research objectives out of the park, then they are going to demand you max out the k-12 outreach.
- supernova87a 5y ago
  I found those NSF outreach requirements very frustrating, because I knew (or believed) that aside from some actually conscientious and dedicated people, most everyone was making up perfunctory or fictitious plans for how they would satisfy this requirement if they got the grant. And the NSF would not be checking on whether people actually did those things, or take back the money if they weren't fulfilled, so basically (I felt at the time) it was incentivizing people to lie about their intentions. I didn't feel good about making up such stories. So I guess I lost out to those who were willing. If you're going to put in requirements like this, I think you'd better follow up and make sure people don't take you for fools and say what you want to hear but not do it later. (edit to add: my experience is based on having been through this 15 years ago, so it's probably to be taken with a grain o salt)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
rexreed 5y ago
Is there any similar advice for getting NSF or other agency SBIR grants that provide for a greater chance of success?
lumost 5y ago
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?
- zozbot234 5y ago
  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.
  - lumost 5y ago
    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.
- the_snooze 5y ago
  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.
- 5y ago
j7ake 5y ago
I wonder what conditions need to be improved in order to make faculty positions more attractive? 0% or negative overhead? No teaching? Longer Sabbaticals? Fewer admin duties? Be left alone to do research?
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Faculty positions are already some of the most coveted and competitive jobs on the planet
  - j7ake 5y ago
    Universities still fight for top talent. So there is still incentive to improve conditions in order to attract and retain talent. Eg how to lure a candidate with multiple offers in hand.
- Fomite 5y ago
  It's not clear that "more attractive" is actually necessary - as mentioned, they're already hugely competed for. But to address your comments: 0% or negative overhead? - While indirect cost return, which is where I get some of my overhead back, is awesome when you can negotiate it, indirects are not the boogeyman HN likes to make them out to be. For government grants, these are known factors. For private industry, lower overhead rates can often be negotiated. Same for foundations, etc. No teaching? - This depends entirely on the person, but generally, reduced teaching obligations help if you're interested in research. There are people who are passionate about teaching and don't want to give that up. There are people who are in purely research positions (like me) and maybe voluntarily teach a single graduate seminar once every other year. Many of both groups love their jobs. Longer Sabbaticals? - There is some research showing that faculty who don't take sabbaticals are more likely to leave. I'd suggest instead of "longer" more frequent. An opportunity to "clear the deck" so to speak. Fewer admin duties? - wistful, longing expression Be left alone to do research? - This is probably our #1 request, but how to actually make that happen is something of an open problem.
jrochkind1 5y ago
> The CAREER Award is a special 5-year grant that can only be applied for 3 times by an individual researcher in the first 6ish years of their career. It is deemed "prestigious" and at many schools it effectively means you'll get tenure. > I was offered the award, but I declined it. Then I resigned from my faculty position and joined industry. OK, we all want to hear more about this right? OP spent a lot of time preparing an application for a very prestigious academic-career-making grant, succeeded in getting it... and then quit!
- ab_testing 5y ago
  Maybe they just discovered levels.fyi :)
- azhenley 5y ago
  I might not be very rational :)
  - gwerbret 5y ago
    Nevertheless! Care to share your story? What turned you away from academia?
    - azhenley 5y ago
      I wasn’t happy. I shared a bit more detail here: https://austinhenley.com/blog/leavingacademia.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/leavingacademia.html
      - yuuu 5y ago
        How do you cope with the feeling that you're missing out on future prestige?
        neel_k 5y ago
        Same way that I (who left industry to pursue an academic career because I wasn't happy) cope with the feeling I am missing out on a giant FAANG salary: mostly, I just don't think about it. Like, I have enough money to afford a house and take my kids on vacation from time to time. So having lots of money is something I idly wonder about sometimes, but no critical need is going unmet by its lack. Conversely, if you have a prestigious position, most likely everyone around you does too. For example, I'm a professor, and yes, it makes my mom proud. But all of my colleagues and many of my friends are professors, too. So in terms of day-to-day life, it just doesn't matter much. I think everyone wonders about what might have been. But you can really only make one choice at a time, and so even if you had chosen differently you will still wonder what might have been.
thrownawayalre 5y ago
What is missing here so far is maybe what happens on the other side. Some researchers meet for a few days at NSF headquarters to discuss the proposal with some NSF officers. It is called the "panel". The researchers essentially rank the proposals and decide the outcome:: proposals at the top of the ranking will be funded until money dries out. Researchers do not know how to evaluate grants the way the NSF wants them to do it. Researchers know how to review papers but not NSF proposals. The broader impacts expectations of the NSF are as obscure to the researchers in the panel as for everyone else. At a panel, after discussing the scientific merits of the proposal, the NSF officers asked the researchers in the panel for broader impacts in the proposal. The first day, the researchers kept pin-pointing (what they thought could be) broader impact items that the NSF officers rejected. As time went by, researchers in the panel started figuring out what kind of broader impacts the NSF officers expected, and could use it to push proposals they liked because of the science. Broader impact sections of the proposals were used to supercharge an already interesting proposal based on the science. While 15-20 researchers may be in the panel, a few of those will be leading the discussions because of character and interest of looking at these proposals. If these researchers have integrity, the panel will do a decent job. I am sure it is highly dependent on the panel, but the ones I participated in, I thought we did a decent job, maybe with an inclination towards funding young PIs who never got funded before. But networking with NSF officers didn't help any PI; the science dominated the ranking. Polished broader impact statements appear naturally in tier 1 universities that have many examples and templates of previously funded proposals. Most of it is window dressing; of course there are genuine initiatives but that's not the norm. Asking for diversity statements or whatnot will favor applicants from the alumni and PIs of the Stanfords and Harvards who can network with their peers to gather existing successful statements. After a few generation of sharing these statements, the polishing gets really really good and looks quite serious. It's fairly easy to write broad impact statements with 5 funded examples, much harder when you have none and nobody to talk to (does requiring diversity statements in applications actually hurt diversity candidates? Who knows, studying that question would likely not get funding). Successful proposals read really well, so well that you wonder how much of the proposed research is already solved. That is a strategy used to write some proposal: when the NSF deadline comes, pick your 1 or 2 most significant unpublished working drafts and write a proposal on the results. Some results you know you already have, others could be interesting generalizations that are within reach, and add to the mix maybe one sexy moonshot. Because you had the paper underway, the story and notation are things you already thought about for a while, and the resulting proposal looks pretty good. If the proposal gets funded, you already have some results to show; good job. Source: academic who also got CAREER the first time, somewhat burnt out by all these games. Don't get me started on academic awards (the ones with a famous name attached to it)--but let me just say that staying away from those will delay the burnout, a bit; those games are much more rigged than NSF panels.
franciscop 5y ago
I've written a couple of grant proposals over the last 2-3 years (though not in academics) and it's been a mysterious black box where I had no idea where to even start, so thank you a lot for sharing this!
Lascaille 5y ago
Thanks for this, this is interesting. I agree, when doing something like this it's hard to know what it should look like in order to be recognised professionally and having a template or example is a huge huge help.
kaycebasques 5y ago
Browsing the author's site, I notice they have a post about Information Foraging Theory, a framework that has been very helpful for me in my technical writing career! https://austinhenley.com/blog/informationforaging.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/informationforaging.html
kriro 5y ago
I only know the European grant system but I'm still perplexed why grant submissions are not blind. It's pretty obvious that certain universities usually get X grants in each cycle simply by putting their name on a proposal. I'd much prefer if you pitched the idea + costs etc. in a blinded document and have double blind decision making which proposals get accepted. Sure that system could still be gamed but at least it would be a bit better (imo). The downside is that you cannot have the "what did you do before that merits getting the grant section" but that could come in the second round or something. It can probably be ignored, too because it doesn't matter that much if the research design is solid (imo).
- anonymousDan 5y ago
  Ya I totally agree. I think the track record should be evaluated separately and independently.
nautilius 5y ago
The whole thing has a strong 'here's what a $1,000,000 lottery ticket looks like' vibe to it. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's a great proposal and I am sure the author put in a lot of work and thinking and I am sure he deserved to win, but that's simply not enough nowadays.
jboynyc 5y ago
That part about how some people have strong opinions about what absolutely needs to be in a proposal, but if you look at a handful of successful ones, there's no clear winning recipe, really resonated, having recently gone through this for a similar ERC competition. The part about finding >10 typos is pretty much my nightmare, and I appreciate the candor with which you share that and other parts of your experience.

293 points by azhenley 5y ago

As faculty in the UK on the receiving end of the current pension cuts that little voice telling me to leave for industry while I still can only gets louder when I hear about people jumping ship like the OP...

wanderer_ 5y ago
[Tangent] Educators just aren't as valued as they used to be. This is a significant issue in my family, as I come from a clan full of teachers of many types.

tomrod 5y ago

> My university took a whooping 53% for overhead. Highway robbery. I love these kinds of breakdowns. It's very useful to help communicate successful models in people's crafts.

monkeybutton 5y ago
I wonder how the university gets to the 53% overhead figure. Do they have a fully costed internal accounting of things like "rent" for lab space and share of administrators' time/salary?
- AmazThrowAway 5y ago
  They have a shockingly detailed model that they negotiate with the federal government ! https://cfo.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/facilities_and_administrative_costs_overview_mar2016.pdf https://cfo.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/facilities_and_...
  - monkeybutton 5y ago
    Wow! Shockingly detailed is not an overstatement.
  - wanderer_ 5y ago
    It seems theirs is even higher (57%).
- ordersofmag 5y ago
  Yes. Cost of space, cost of power, cost of business office staff to process the paychecks, cost of a bunch of CPA and auditors to make sure you're following all the federal regulations about how the money can be spend, cost of IT to provide WiFi and network jacks and bandwidth, cost of water in the water fountain, etc, etc.... At institutions where a large fraction of the work going on is grant funded if you didn't do it this way you can't really make your institutional budget balance. And 53% is actually pretty low compared to many institutions. Source: I've been 100% grant funded the last 20 years of my career and have been involved in writing 100's of federal research grants.
  - yazaddaruvala 5y ago
    > Cost of space, cost of power, cost of IT to provide WiFi and network jacks and bandwidth, cost of water in the water fountain Time to move to a WeWork? WeWork All Access - $3600/year. Or at home for "free" if no real lab is needed. > cost of business office staff to process the paychecks Time to move to Direct Deposit? For a grand total of $0! > cost of a bunch of CPA and auditors to make sure you're following all the federal regulations about how the money can be spend Let them spend it however for free? or hire a CPA for a couple days. No need for $173k worth of CPA time per grant. > At institutions where a large fraction of the work going on is grant funded if you didn't do it this way you can't really make your institutional budget balance. Based on the math, they either need to invest into automation or it seems like a dying industry.
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      I think it’s your expectations that are out of whack. There is sticker shock, but pretty much everywhere else is higher. Also, do you know what a clusterfuck it is if someone screws up accounting, payroll, or legal? Those systems are Byzantine and you really do need an expert to navigate them legally. Institutions don’t take the risk that an individual might take.
    - Fomite 5y ago
      My institution employs about 7000 people. I'm interested if there's a single company that employs that many people you can point to that pays $0 to handle payroll.
AmazThrowAway 5y ago
I'm very curious if this number is actually correct; in my experience "53%" overhead means the university adds a $0.53 "tax" on each dollar you spend, which works out to the university "taking" ~35% of the total amount. Still high, but not as high as I used to think.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

glofish 5y ago

also noteworthy elements: university overhead 53%, so that leaves $250K. Over five years that works out to basically $50K/year That needs to cover 1 month summer salary plus the salary and the tuition for a single student, and the travel to conferences, and the experiment ... and that is a "prestigious" CAREER award only few people get ... no wonder the author jumped ship

the_snooze 5y ago
At my institute, that's not how overhead is calculated. Overhead is a percentage of what the PI is budgeted for. So for a $500K grant, 53% overhead really means about 34.6% of $500K. The university's cut is $173K, which is 53% of the PI's budget of $327K.
lazyjeff 5y ago
Actually the math doesn't work quite like that, but it's a common misconception. 53% indirect costs (overhead) is multiplied on the direct costs rather than the total amount, so it is actually 500K-500K/(1+0.53) = 173K taken by the university assuming the full amount can be charged indirect. In practice, some charges like tuition and equipment do not have indirects, so the actual amount taken by the university would be about 135K +- 35K out of the 500K. So you get about 365K of direct spendable money from the 500K if the overhead rate is 53% (as it is at the University of Tennessee where the author was). The indirect cost rate is decided by the federal government based on data by the universities, so it's accounted for in the grant award amounts. So it's not as nefarious as it sounds.
- javiramos 5y ago
  Point is the same
- ta988 5y ago
  And most of the time (if not always with NIH) when researchers say they got a $x grant, x is the direct cost so what they get directly. then you can often negotiate things back from your university such as time on shared equipments, students...

countvonbalzac 5y ago

I am not in academia but the 53% overhead to an outsider is absurd! Probably the same reason tuition has gotten so high, someone has to pay for all those deans, vice deans and vice vice deans!

light_hue_1 5y ago
Compared to industry? That's very low! Universities are cheap. 53% overhead works out to be 34% of the total money. I've written grants with many industrial partners (companies you would recognize). All have had much higher overhead rates. Normally these rates are kept secret, but here's a fun memo from the Federal Transit Administration talking about 127% overhead rates! https://www.transit.dot.gov/funding/procurement/third-party-procurement/overhead-rates https://www.transit.dot.gov/funding/procurement/third-party-... The DoD gives as an example a rate of 125%! > For example, in recovering the indirect costs associated with particular contracts during the year, each dollar of engineering direct labor worked on a contract is burdened with an engineering overhead of 125.95 percent. https://www.dhg.com/portals/0/headers/industries/government-contracting/fundamentals-of-government-contracting-webinars/Navigating-the-Sea-of-Overhead-Reference-Documents.pdf https://www.dhg.com/portals/0/headers/industries/government-... This puts universities in some context: https://www.healthra.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Nature_Keeping-the-Lights-On-Article.pdf https://www.healthra.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Nature_K... You'll see that non-profits and hospitals tend to have far higher rates. This doesn't include industry though. Which would be far higher.
- Anechoic 5y ago
  The DoD gives as an example a rate of 125%! For DOT engineering design firms and environmental firms, a typical overhead rate is 165%-ish, I've seen ranges from 125% to 250%. Over 180% is considered "high".
sndean 5y ago
I've heard Harvard's is/was 96%? Or at least that was for a NIH R01-seeking person there in ~biochemistry in 2015. Where I'm at it's probably around 100% but I really don't want to know. We're all expensive.

908B64B197 5y ago

If you read the proposal, the 8th section is the forced diversity statement and goal. I was expecting it to be a little bit more obvious.

ordersofmag 5y ago
The 'Broader Impacts' section the proposal is a required element for all National Science Foundation proposals (like this one). It need not be about diversity but you need to articulate how your proposed work has "potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes." So certainly it's forced. In the same way demonstrating the Intellectual Merit of your work is also forced (that being the other criteria against which the proposal is going to be judged).
ModernMech 5y ago
Researchers should absolutely be required to ruminate on the broader public impacts of their research when requesting vast sums of money from the public. I once heard a researcher on NPR being interviewed about the ethical considerations of Deep Fake research and their answer was (parphrased) "I don't think about these things, I just do the science. The ethical impacts are for others to think about" and I jaw hit the floor. Today we see the unintended consequences of various technologies finding confluence in the public sphere, and the impacts are reverberating across society. Now more than ever researchers have to be cognizant of the broader societal impacts of their work.

xwdv 5y ago

Nothing in this proposal should take 5 years. For $250k you can easily do this research in a single focused year probably. I imagine researchers must actually be doing multiple grants in parallel or have other main jobs to earn decent money because if they only do this one thing at a time I have no idea why someone would choose this life of poverty when they could be making solid six figures building practical things.

rsfern 5y ago
A lot of the work involves training PhD students to do the research, it’s a big component particularly for NSF funding. So it’s not just the raw research output And yeah, most professors try to have multiple programs going. This one would have funded one student for a few years
ordersofmag 5y ago
Folks submitting Career grants already have nominally full-time time jobs as faculty with corresponding full-time salaries. The jobs are usually termed '9-month' appointments to allow them time in the summer to get paid for research. So the 5 year timeline reflects that this is not most of what they are doing. Certainly if you have CS background and you're mostly interested in making money this is not the career path for you.
amcoastal 5y ago
Yeah, but that's the way these things go. The people working on this project are working on 5 other ones as well. It would be nice to work on fewer research projects at once but the way these grants work (check out the low total amount), its generally unfeasible. Its sort of laughable extremely hard to get grants from the NSF, DoD etc. wouldn't even pay 2 typical FAANG SE 1 year FTE.
- lumost 5y ago
  I do wonder why academics don't open up research collabs with industrial engineers more frequently (without the corporation involvement). I can think of a half dozen academic research problems which are bottle necked on coding.

danielmorozoff 5y ago

Having written NSF grants and other grants - DARPA etc. I have won some and lost many. I compiled a few non obvious takeaways: - Story telling is everything. It seems this is a huge lesson never taught in grad school. - Technical details sometimes work against you. The author is absolutely right that getting the general thought process across is crucial. - Who you get on your review committee tends to significantly skew the outcome. Can make or break your chances. - I have known a lot of groundbreaking work funded by other money for these exact reasons. Sometimes good science is too far afield for people to understand. An anecdote i like from recent times is how Eric Betzig built the super res microscope. Here's the background. https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/04/quitting-failures-a-microscope-in-the-living-room-nobel-prize/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/04/quitting-failures-a-... TLDR: he won the Nobel... The sad truth is $500k for a career grant seems like a lot when you're in the university, but when you get out and see where else money is being spent you realize how poor academia really is.

zzz95 5y ago
The takeaways are very true. I would go further to say that not only is the story telling and the scientific vision a very important part of the sell, the language and terminology needs to be in sync with the reviewers. Often times researchers write very technical details in the proposal that is hard to parse and backfires. In non-blind proposals, pre-communication is the key.
ModernMech 5y ago
> The sad truth is $500k for a career grant seems like a lot when you're in the university, but when you get out and see where else money is being spent you realize how poor academia really is. It's not just about the $500k, it's about the freedom to do your project your way from start to finish. I can't get $500k from any investors to do my work; their number one question is what's their ROI, which is not even in the universe of my concerns. The last thing I ever want to think about is how to profit from my research. Another choice is to join a company and then convince that company my idea is worth while. If I get the greenlight to go ahead that's great, but then I'm still always living under the threat of being fired or the project getting canned. Any University is happy to have a CAREER recipient, and your award is portable between institutions. And sure you'd possibly be able to convince your company to sponsor a project you're interested in leading, but the for something like $500k you'd better have a good business case for it, and I can't imagine them approving something that would last 5 years unless it really aligns with their business goals. In order to get the clout to actually ask for this kind of project you'd also need to be at the company for a while, whereas something like a CAREER award is intended for early-career faculty. Imagine going up to your boss and saying: "You know that job you hired me for? I'd like you to keep paying me my regular salary, but I'd also like $500k to work on my own pet project about 70% of the time from September to May, and 100% over the summer. Oh, and I'd like to do this for the next 5 years."

supernova87a 5y ago

You know, the thing I always found extremely frustrating or non-transparent about the academic grant process (and it leaks over into government / NSF / etc applications by the nature of who evaluates those: academics again) is how much unofficial or unspoken criteria come into it. You get extra credit points if you're active in visiting other universities and giving talks on the annual job circuit. You tend to do well if you advisors are well-connected. You have to sprinkle a bit of fad-ish topics into your research if even if it's a stretch to do so. I suppose that it has always been so. And now looking back, I don't find huge fault in that you should be able to connect your research with larger ideas. Or that people in richer environments with more information are generally more successful. But having tried to be on the faculty track before, from a middle-tier university, I never knew these things. Or the professors I was around never told me those unofficial factors. And I thought it very unfair that the judges allowed those factors to creep into their consideration without making it clear to everyone that those were important. If giving talks in person is important, tell people at least. I naively (I guess) thought that the strength of what you wrote in the application/grant document dominated. Maybe it does for some fields or if reviewers are diligent about understanding the blinders they wear and their availability bias. Well, anyway, I left the field all the same. No regrets, but I wish these fields would improve their explicit processes about it. I do note with some amusement now in industry, that basically I am able to approve spending of $500k for certain things with approximately a 30 minute conversation with leadership (with appropriate justification and documentation)...

derbOac 5y ago
I went to a grant writing workshop sponsored by the university. When I got there the entire thing, and I mean entire thing, was about buttering up the grant review officers, how to network with people at the agencies, how to work your way into being their friends, and so forth. Not a single thing about the writing process, or how to frame your ideas, or anything like that. I know that's not how grants are always awarded, but as a junior faculty member it's hard to know what to make of that, when a university-sponsored workshop is structured around those issues. It's difficult for me to wrap my head around this all most of the time, to convey to an outsider what bothers me so much about the whole thing, or to even articulate it to myself. I can make comparisons to certain things (Theranos, cryptocurrencies, or economic bubbles) but it's very abstract and fuzzy and imperfect. So much of it seems empty to me, or false.

c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago

I was involved in writing a grant relating to product development (Singapore has a SG$250k grant for developing product prototypes). Between 5 colleagues, I estimate there was a bare minimum of 300 hours of work... the application itself, multiple rounds of follow ups and justifications, documentation/receipts on how money was spent, etc.

hammock 5y ago

What is an "education plan" in the context of a grant proposal?

rsfern 5y ago
I thought it would mostly be training grad students, but they did a great job weaving the program into their undergrad courses and like professional outreach. That section of the proposal is super skimmable, each paragraph has a pithy bold summary header!
- hammock 5y ago
  I'm guessing the idea is all grant research should serve some educational purpose for the grad students- is that the idea ?
Fomite 5y ago
The NSF heavily pushes the idea that there should be a mentorship and teaching component to most/all of their funded proposals.

deater 5y ago

as someone who couldn't manage getting hired by an R1 university, and also had three NSF CAREER proposals rejected, it's a bit sobering to see someone get it all so easily and then walk away from it. Not that I necessarily blame him, fairly burnt out on academia myself currently. Not getting a CAREER award can really set one back, both in time wasted applying but then having to compete with those who have them. I often felt like the NSF asks for so much these days, including excessive (and possibly unrealistic amounts of) K-12 outreach. I am always curious if you go back after 5 years, how many of the winners actually did everything they promised in the proposal.

lumost 5y ago
If there is no measurement, or limited enforcement - then I'd bet it's approximately equal to one or two visits. Whenever someone tacks on way more requirements than could possibly be met, there is a natural prioritization. If after 5 years you didn't deliver on the core idea - then the NSF probably won't care that you completed all of the k-12 outreach. If you hit the research objectives out of the park, then they are going to demand you max out the k-12 outreach.
supernova87a 5y ago
I found those NSF outreach requirements very frustrating, because I knew (or believed) that aside from some actually conscientious and dedicated people, most everyone was making up perfunctory or fictitious plans for how they would satisfy this requirement if they got the grant. And the NSF would not be checking on whether people actually did those things, or take back the money if they weren't fulfilled, so basically (I felt at the time) it was incentivizing people to lie about their intentions. I didn't feel good about making up such stories. So I guess I lost out to those who were willing. If you're going to put in requirements like this, I think you'd better follow up and make sure people don't take you for fools and say what you want to hear but not do it later. (edit to add: my experience is based on having been through this 15 years ago, so it's probably to be taken with a grain o salt)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

rexreed 5y ago

Is there any similar advice for getting NSF or other agency SBIR grants that provide for a greater chance of success?

lumost 5y ago

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?

zozbot234 5y ago
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.
- lumost 5y ago
  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.
the_snooze 5y ago
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.
5y ago

j7ake 5y ago

I wonder what conditions need to be improved in order to make faculty positions more attractive? 0% or negative overhead? No teaching? Longer Sabbaticals? Fewer admin duties? Be left alone to do research?

s1artibartfast 5y ago
Faculty positions are already some of the most coveted and competitive jobs on the planet
- j7ake 5y ago
  Universities still fight for top talent. So there is still incentive to improve conditions in order to attract and retain talent. Eg how to lure a candidate with multiple offers in hand.
Fomite 5y ago
It's not clear that "more attractive" is actually necessary - as mentioned, they're already hugely competed for. But to address your comments: 0% or negative overhead? - While indirect cost return, which is where I get some of my overhead back, is awesome when you can negotiate it, indirects are not the boogeyman HN likes to make them out to be. For government grants, these are known factors. For private industry, lower overhead rates can often be negotiated. Same for foundations, etc. No teaching? - This depends entirely on the person, but generally, reduced teaching obligations help if you're interested in research. There are people who are passionate about teaching and don't want to give that up. There are people who are in purely research positions (like me) and maybe voluntarily teach a single graduate seminar once every other year. Many of both groups love their jobs. Longer Sabbaticals? - There is some research showing that faculty who don't take sabbaticals are more likely to leave. I'd suggest instead of "longer" more frequent. An opportunity to "clear the deck" so to speak. Fewer admin duties? - wistful, longing expression Be left alone to do research? - This is probably our #1 request, but how to actually make that happen is something of an open problem.

jrochkind1 5y ago

> The CAREER Award is a special 5-year grant that can only be applied for 3 times by an individual researcher in the first 6ish years of their career. It is deemed "prestigious" and at many schools it effectively means you'll get tenure. > I was offered the award, but I declined it. Then I resigned from my faculty position and joined industry. OK, we all want to hear more about this right? OP spent a lot of time preparing an application for a very prestigious academic-career-making grant, succeeded in getting it... and then quit!

ab_testing 5y ago
Maybe they just discovered levels.fyi :)
azhenley 5y ago
I might not be very rational :)
- gwerbret 5y ago
  Nevertheless! Care to share your story? What turned you away from academia?
  - azhenley 5y ago
    I wasn’t happy. I shared a bit more detail here: https://austinhenley.com/blog/leavingacademia.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/leavingacademia.html
    - yuuu 5y ago
      How do you cope with the feeling that you're missing out on future prestige?
      - neel_k 5y ago
        Same way that I (who left industry to pursue an academic career because I wasn't happy) cope with the feeling I am missing out on a giant FAANG salary: mostly, I just don't think about it. Like, I have enough money to afford a house and take my kids on vacation from time to time. So having lots of money is something I idly wonder about sometimes, but no critical need is going unmet by its lack. Conversely, if you have a prestigious position, most likely everyone around you does too. For example, I'm a professor, and yes, it makes my mom proud. But all of my colleagues and many of my friends are professors, too. So in terms of day-to-day life, it just doesn't matter much. I think everyone wonders about what might have been. But you can really only make one choice at a time, and so even if you had chosen differently you will still wonder what might have been.

thrownawayalre 5y ago

What is missing here so far is maybe what happens on the other side. Some researchers meet for a few days at NSF headquarters to discuss the proposal with some NSF officers. It is called the "panel". The researchers essentially rank the proposals and decide the outcome:: proposals at the top of the ranking will be funded until money dries out. Researchers do not know how to evaluate grants the way the NSF wants them to do it. Researchers know how to review papers but not NSF proposals. The broader impacts expectations of the NSF are as obscure to the researchers in the panel as for everyone else. At a panel, after discussing the scientific merits of the proposal, the NSF officers asked the researchers in the panel for broader impacts in the proposal. The first day, the researchers kept pin-pointing (what they thought could be) broader impact items that the NSF officers rejected. As time went by, researchers in the panel started figuring out what kind of broader impacts the NSF officers expected, and could use it to push proposals they liked because of the science. Broader impact sections of the proposals were used to supercharge an already interesting proposal based on the science. While 15-20 researchers may be in the panel, a few of those will be leading the discussions because of character and interest of looking at these proposals. If these researchers have integrity, the panel will do a decent job. I am sure it is highly dependent on the panel, but the ones I participated in, I thought we did a decent job, maybe with an inclination towards funding young PIs who never got funded before. But networking with NSF officers didn't help any PI; the science dominated the ranking. Polished broader impact statements appear naturally in tier 1 universities that have many examples and templates of previously funded proposals. Most of it is window dressing; of course there are genuine initiatives but that's not the norm. Asking for diversity statements or whatnot will favor applicants from the alumni and PIs of the Stanfords and Harvards who can network with their peers to gather existing successful statements. After a few generation of sharing these statements, the polishing gets really really good and looks quite serious. It's fairly easy to write broad impact statements with 5 funded examples, much harder when you have none and nobody to talk to (does requiring diversity statements in applications actually hurt diversity candidates? Who knows, studying that question would likely not get funding). Successful proposals read really well, so well that you wonder how much of the proposed research is already solved. That is a strategy used to write some proposal: when the NSF deadline comes, pick your 1 or 2 most significant unpublished working drafts and write a proposal on the results. Some results you know you already have, others could be interesting generalizations that are within reach, and add to the mix maybe one sexy moonshot. Because you had the paper underway, the story and notation are things you already thought about for a while, and the resulting proposal looks pretty good. If the proposal gets funded, you already have some results to show; good job. Source: academic who also got CAREER the first time, somewhat burnt out by all these games. Don't get me started on academic awards (the ones with a famous name attached to it)--but let me just say that staying away from those will delay the burnout, a bit; those games are much more rigged than NSF panels.

franciscop 5y ago

I've written a couple of grant proposals over the last 2-3 years (though not in academics) and it's been a mysterious black box where I had no idea where to even start, so thank you a lot for sharing this!

Lascaille 5y ago

Thanks for this, this is interesting. I agree, when doing something like this it's hard to know what it should look like in order to be recognised professionally and having a template or example is a huge huge help.

kaycebasques 5y ago

Browsing the author's site, I notice they have a post about Information Foraging Theory, a framework that has been very helpful for me in my technical writing career! https://austinhenley.com/blog/informationforaging.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/informationforaging.html

kriro 5y ago

I only know the European grant system but I'm still perplexed why grant submissions are not blind. It's pretty obvious that certain universities usually get X grants in each cycle simply by putting their name on a proposal. I'd much prefer if you pitched the idea + costs etc. in a blinded document and have double blind decision making which proposals get accepted. Sure that system could still be gamed but at least it would be a bit better (imo). The downside is that you cannot have the "what did you do before that merits getting the grant section" but that could come in the second round or something. It can probably be ignored, too because it doesn't matter that much if the research design is solid (imo).

anonymousDan 5y ago
Ya I totally agree. I think the track record should be evaluated separately and independently.

nautilius 5y ago

The whole thing has a strong 'here's what a $1,000,000 lottery ticket looks like' vibe to it. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's a great proposal and I am sure the author put in a lot of work and thinking and I am sure he deserved to win, but that's simply not enough nowadays.

jboynyc 5y ago

That part about how some people have strong opinions about what absolutely needs to be in a proposal, but if you look at a handful of successful ones, there's no clear winning recipe, really resonated, having recently gone through this for a similar ERC competition. The part about finding >10 typos is pretty much my nightmare, and I appreciate the candor with which you share that and other parts of your experience.