so Neuronix and others, after having gone through this would you recommend it to others?
I'm just starting grad school and planning to do it in 3 yrs (I have the right project and mentor to get it done, now just need a healthy dose of luck). It looks like it took you at least 2 years AFTER SUBMITTING to get funded, basically right when you were leaving grad school. I know you got a decent institutional allowance for M3 books, Step II, etc. But from reading all of the posts on here, it seems like it is not allowed to use that allowance to travel to residency interviews (except to fudge it by saying you are going to coincident "scientific meetings"). Furthermore, your school did not supplement your stipend accordingly (as mine also refuses to do).
So I am sitting here weighing the pros and cons of going through this:
PROS
-looks good on a CV. Frankly this is way too temporally delayed of a Pro to have much pull. If you do great research as a fellow, publish well, and get a nice K, is an F30 that you got in grad school really going to make the difference between getting an Asst. Prof. job and not getting it? Seems doubtful to me.
-get experience working with NIH. F--- that. I mean, yes, it's good, but after all of the bureaucracy that I've read about it here, this is not appealing, even if it is "practical knowledge". But who knows how things will change in the next 8ish years before I am ready to apply for a K award. Maybe they will actually streamline the grant application system, which has supposedly been in the works forever. Then this "getting experience" could actually be counter-productive, or at the minimum a wash.
-institutional allowance. Yes this seems nice, but my PI is well-funded and I think I can get allowance for travel to meetings, etc. from him if needed. As for M3, nobody seems to buy a whole lot of books, and everybody already owns a stethoscope, reflex hammer, etc. Pagers are given to us. Step II is a costly expense but not a whole lot compared to residency travel, which, as I mentioned above, shouldn't really be covered by the allowance according to my reading of the F30 literature and what I have read on this board.
-help out my MSTP program, my PI, etc. Yes I suppose this is a pro, but my program isn't willing to give me a supplement to my stipend at all, so if they aren't going to compensate my effort then what is my incentive? Altruism is all well and good but the Gordon Gekko in me thinks that a month of my effort deserves at least a modicum of compensation. As for my PI, he could probably use the money (who couldn't?) but it's not going to make or break him by any stretch of the imagination.
-get feedback from a study section about one's project. This is probably the best thing I can see coming out of this. But in my grad program our qualifying exam is basically a grant proposal for our thesis, so I will effectively already get this once. Plus by the time I have gone through the process of getting the F30, I might only have a year left in grad school, at which point many of the experiments will have already been done. And if they haven't, it will have probably been because my project totally shifted gears, and the F30 proposal feedback is no longer relevant to my work.
CONS
-they're hard to get. This message board is filled with people who got them, but they also cite cutoff scores and percentages and whatnot which seem to indicate that they are not sure locks. And I'm sure there are plenty of non-posters who didn't make the cut.
-no stipend supplement
-TIME. Seems like people waste an awful lot of time on these things, and especially on the red tape. Even older MSTPs at my program say that after passing their quals, they still took 3-4wks to convert that into an F30 and write all of the other stuff, then do all of the paperwork. That's 1 month of time that could be spent doing experiments to help me to get out of grad school ASAP.
-ethically, I don't think I could use the institutional allowance for residency interviews, which are the main cost of MS3-4.
-hassle. Dealing with all of the red tape does not appeal to me. People might chide me here for not facing up to the reality that is getting funding from the NIH and whatnot. My reply would be: why bother with it right now when I don't have to, when I can just be a carefree grad student for a few years? And if I decide to continue on a research career later, THEN I can deal with all of that bulls---?
Right now, I have to say that the cons seem to outweigh the pros. Maybe I am just being pessimistic, but I don't think so. I'm normally a pretty optimistic guy, I feel great about my PI and project, I'm confident that grad school will go reasonably well. You could say that I am not yet jaded. But I was looking around at our MSTP retreat a few weeks ago and wondering why - if these grants were really so great - only two people had gotten one of these in the last two years from my program. I think the answer is that it's just not worth it, for the reasons I enumerated above.
Thoughts?
). Also, in MS3/4 that should cover any prep/review books for shelf exams (possibly also a question bank like USMLE world?), Step 2 CK, and Step 2 CS.
