Denied!

Forgot to mention something from Monday.

Various funding agencies have limited submission programs: they only accept a set number of proposals from an institution. So, when more people want to submit proposals than there are slots available, there has to be some mechanism to sort out who will submit.

So I had submitted an internal preproposal for one of these limited submission grants. Previously, we had our Dean review these and decide. This year, for the first time, for reasons I don't entirely understand, instead of just reading the preproposal (which was about 5 pages, if I remember right), they formed this little committee to review the preproposals, and asked the authors (like me) to come in and give a presentation justifying our preproposal.

I spent several hours working on a little song and dance for this.

Since you read the title for this entry, you know I got turned down.

At this point, I am not convinced that this new review mechanism adds any value to the submission process. It just seems to eat up more time.