Please keep me motivated

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.
Joined
Feb 23, 2012
Messages
698
Reaction score
863
Currently going to start my G2 year which means several things:

1. My initial incoming med school classmates have matched, graduated and are in (or going to start very soon) their residencies

2. I am two halves of the wrong doctor

3. Currently working on my thesis proposal which is in three weeks

4. Realizing how crappy my F30 really was that I submitted in April

5. Theoretically halfway done, but feel like I have basically done nothing


Let's keep each other motivated here!

I'll start: this is a fantastic time to get a lot of living, fun, romance, and happiness accomplished!!!

Next?

Members don't see this ad.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: 1 users
G3 here.
1. Old project hit a brick wall that I couldn't get through.
2. Took a small vacation. Started some new projects that look promising.
3. Decided to focus on becoming the best scientist I can and stop stressing over this long *** path.

Started working out again seriously and really enjoying the city I'm living in (friends, nature, beer, etc). Gotta say that it's making the journey a lot more manageable.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 2 users
Members don't see this ad :)
The PhD is a hero’s journey
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 user
F30 is nothing. During my first year of fellowship, I submitted 8 grants. None got funded. All are basically garbage. Ironically, whether something gets funded has little to do with whether it's garbage. When you grow up you'll realize that what really matters, to the extent of a baseline livelihood, isn't quality but relationships and comptence. If you want to excel, of course, you need quality and relationships and lots of luck, but that's a separate issue.
 
Keeping in line with overdue updates every several years for you guys on this thread (if anyone actually cares), but I'm officially an MD-PhD, matched to my #1 choice in my field, and in the thick of residency now. Life gets better... it's not determined by p-values.

Hope you all are doing well, and looking forward to hearing others' progresses throughout the years as well.

FS
 
  • Like
  • Love
Reactions: 13 users
F30 is nothing. During my first year of fellowship, I submitted 8 grants. None got funded. All are basically garbage. Ironically, whether something gets funded has little to do with whether it's garbage. When you grow up you'll realize that what really matters, to the extent of a baseline livelihood, isn't quality but relationships and comptence. If you want to excel, of course, you need quality and relationships and lots of luck, but that's a separate issue.

You wrote 8 grants in your first year of fellowship?

You are really a super man!

I don't even know there are that many fellowship-level grants available in my field.....
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 user
You wrote 8 grants in your first year of fellowship?

You are really a super man!

I don't even know there are that many fellowship-level grants available in my field.....
Actually, few of the 8 are "fellowship-level".

One is an R21 that had my mentor as the PI, since fellows are not eligible to be PIs. But I basically wrote the whole grant, including putting the administrative package together. Several others were society/industry grants that had no specific "level" requirement. If you want to send grants out you can just use your mentor's name.

Unfortunately, this is kind of expected now. The lengths of the 8 grants are comparable to say 3 R01 level grants, which is the expectation. So, no. Not "super man". This is the typical performance of an average research academic faculty at a top 50 level institution.

Recently chatting with half a dozen dept chairs, and the prevailing ethos is 75% soft money salary arrangement. Given reviewers complain anytime you put 30% FTE on your budget for your own salary, it basically means you have to maintain multiple R01s if you care enough about having a full-time academic appointment. Given that funding R01 rates are around 10% per submission, you can do math on how many grants you have to submit on average to get one funded in a 5 year window. Good news is that once you are a PI, you largely don't have to do anything else other than writing grants (and maybe sometimes write some papers). Actual science is done by people hired on grants. So if you don't like writing grants (as a hobby, since academic PI salary pays poorly), you are probably not a good fit for a career in academic research.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: 1 users
Actually, few of the 8 are "fellowship-level".

One is an R21 that had my mentor as the PI, since fellows are not eligible to be PIs. But I basically wrote the whole grant, including putting the administrative package together. Several others were society/industry grants that had no specific "level" requirement. If you want to send grants out you can just use your mentor's name.

Unfortunately, this is kind of expected now. The lengths of the 8 grants are comparable to say 3 R01 level grants, which is the expectation. So, no. Not "super man". This is the typical performance of an average research academic faculty at a top 50 level institution.

Recently chatting with half a dozen dept chairs, and the prevailing ethos is 75% soft money salary arrangement. Given reviewers complain anytime you put 30% FTE on your budget for your own salary, it basically means you have to maintain multiple R01s if you care enough about having a full-time academic appointment. Given that funding R01 rates are around 10% per submission, you can do math on how many grants you have to submit on average to get one funded in a 5 year window. Good news is that once you are a PI, you largely don't have to do anything else other than writing grants (and maybe sometimes write some papers). Actual science is done by people hired on grants. So if you don't like writing grants (as a hobby, since academic PI salary pays poorly), you are probably not a good fit for a career in academic research.
Depends on the mechanism. R35s require 50% dedicated time to research pursuits on the grant. Of course, 50% is a somewhat meaningless metric because the NIH views most of that based on a 40 work week, but even so, that grant mechanism requires a minimum amount of FTE dedication that is above 30%.

But otherwise I agree that the "typical" FTE on a R01 is about 20 to 30%. Many PIs would prefer to have more FTE on a single grant, but then as you state, they would have to do more of the actual work, which is usually not interesting to them and they would much prefer to have multiple R01 at 20 to 30% effort which combined, leads to more direct costs where they are just the overseer/delegator.
 
Top