, 2 min read
Funding application blues
When I was a student, I got fairly lucky in funding applications: as an undergraduate student, I got the C.D Howe Memorial scholarship which explains why I have $0 in student debt. Then as a graduate student, I had my own funding all the way till I got my Ph.D. It was nice. Then, things got tougher. The forms got longer. The requirements got increasingly more difficult to meet. In the last few years, I got into “funding application hell” where the forms are extremely long to fill, the competition is fierce. You are supposed to talk about the projects and research you are doing, but of course, you have no time for research because you are stuck filling out forms so that, hopefully, you’ll be able to do your work. My first encounter with really boring funding applications was when I first started as a Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada. At the time, I applied for NSERC funding which I still have to this day, but also, many other funding applications. I was the Team Leader for the e-Health Research Group and so, I automatically got involved with many funding proposals. I could not believe what it meant: stopping all your research for several months while you have meetings, and write relatively boring documents one after the other. Right now, I’m fairly deep in funding applications and will be for at least another month, and after that, I’ll continuously have to work on funding up until this autumn. I don’t think that many students are aware of the fact that research for a professor or researcher often doesn’t not mean thinking about new ideas, there is very little time for that, sometimes it doesn’t even mean writting about new ideas… sometimes research means filling out long forms.
It is a well guarded secret, but more than brand new exciting ideas and great papers and great teaching… the modern value of a scholar is often measured by how much money he can attract. Whether he needs a lot of money or not is irrelevant. I’m not complaining about the system, but this is a part of it that people don’t often talk about. You don’t see on a researcher’s home page “just spent the last 2 months filling out funding applications, I hope it will work”.