Another Grant Away.

It seems that about 90% of my job is grant writing. I don’t teach, and I have precious little time for my actual funded research. Most of my time is spent doing work for grant submissions. But that’s how it goes. Especially for junior investigators on soft money. It’s very difficult to keep yourself fully funded. My institution shifted me from hard money to soft pretty abruptly. I have a single grant that is over in 5 months. After that, I’m on the good graces of my institution. So I need to be productive until such time as I get another hit.

So I’m submitting a lot. I put in three grants at the end of 2011, two in October and one in December. None was funded. Now I’m preparing a resubmission from the December grant, and I’ve just completed a grant with my boss. We submitted it today, and it cleared grants.gov with no errors. It’s an interesting grant, examining a troublesome population of patients. There is a lot of interesting work to be done: providing that population with good care; improving access for members of the public who are thwarted by this troublesome population, etc.. It’s a good project.

My boss (who is PI for this grant, but who is not my “PI” in the sense that most scientists mean when they describe “their PI”), is a great boss, and a good shrink. I think he’s a pretty good scientist, but I haven’t seen it in action yet. But he waited a long time to get going on this grant, and as a result I think it’s a little vague. Hopefully we clarified it enough to satisfy the reviewers. But I honestly don’t expect to be funded, because I think it’s the wrong mechanism. We applied to a funding agency that wants to fund implementation, and this is more effectiveness. We’ll see.

All in all, I’m concerned. Things happen slowly everywhere, and I’m nervous about being employed. But we’ll see. I have irons in fires, but I never know what’ll happen. I sent an email to a guy at a nice east-coast university two weeks ago and didn’t hear a thing back yet. Maybe it’ll happen. Maybe it won’t. Overall, I’m doing pretty darned well. But the horizon is looming, and I get afraid. Fear is a bedeviling emotion.

Nevertheless. The grant is away, and there were no errors, and it’ll be graded along with the others. That’s all I can do. With the limited time I had for this grant, and the minimal help I got from my boss, it’s as good as I could make it. That’ll either be good enough, or it won’t. It’s out of my hands now. Time to move forward.