The NSF GRFP problem continues

This morning, a fine scientist congratulated two undergraduates in her lab about winning National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awards. I thought, “Huh. They’re out? And two seems like a lot from one lab.”

A few years ago, Terry McGlynn wrote an important blog post about how tilted the playing field is for the NSF GRFP awards. He compared awards to Harvard students (with about 7,000 undergraduates) to the more than 20 campuses in the California State University system (over 400,000, according to a check of Wikipedia).

The NSF is good about making it easy to find a list of all 2,000 awards in this program. I went looking for the same comparison of one Ivy League university to an entire state’s system. Embarrassingly, I screwed up the calculation on the first pass, not realizing that several California State universities don’t say “California State” in their name, unlike the University of Texas institutions.

Harvard got 43, and all of California State get 50 (thanks to Terry for counting here and here).

Cal Poly Pomona 4
Cal Poly SLO 5
CSUCI 1
CSUDH 1
CSU Fresno 1
CSU Fullerton 8
CSULB 2
CSULA 1
Sac State 1
CSUSB 1
CSUN 5
CSUSM 3
SDSU 6
SFSU 6
SJSU 3
Humboldt State 2

So one lab in Harvard alone equaled the entire combined output of eight different California State universities (separately, not combined).

If this sort of pattern intrigues you, you must for to Natalie Telis’s post where she digs down into the numbers. Not just this year’s, but over 28,000 awardees worth of data, from 2011 to 2017. It’s bloody brilliant. One of her first points is, “The most expensive undergraduate schools have an extreme excess of (NSF GRFP) recipients.” She also makes some comments on Twitter about this.

I can’t wait to see what she finds for 2018 data.

Matt Cover did some similar things the previous year, and found no relationship between institutional enrollment and number of grants.

Update, 2 August 2019: Here’s the second half of Natalie Tellis’s analysis of GRFP awards.

External links

NSF Graduate Fellowships are a part of the problem
The price of a GRFP, part 1
Matt Cover thread from 2017

Why I stopped writing grants

A couple of threads on Twitter recently reminded me of something. This from Liang Gao (my emphasis):

Just visited a new PI. He showed me beautiful research, top publications , and thousands pages of unfunded proposals. What the hell is going on?

Then there was Prof-like Substance:

Remember that when applying to NSF, this is what you’re up against. ~6% success from the process. Which is why I tell people over and over and over that if you don't diversify, you will get eaten alive. You. Can. Not. Go up against 6% success for a decade and think everything will be fine. It won’t.

Then there was this charming reminder from Jacquelyn Gill that in addition to dealing with biases about sex, race, and “academic pedigree,” you have to deal with biases about geography:

An equipment grant I'm a co-PI on is #NSFunded! I'm grateful for the chance to do some fun new research. But two reviewers mentioned how small UMaine is. One said it “only has 13,000 students.” Another said there’s “not much up there but moose.”

A lot of people are reaching the point I got to maybe four of five years ago, when I wrote:

Personally, if you’d asked me when I started this job if I thought that I’d be able to get grants for my research, I’d have said, “I think it’ll take me a few tries, but I think I can do it.” Well, that hasn’t happened. So I’ve had to re-invent myself, my expectations, everything, from almost the ground up. It’s been a decade-long battle to redefine myself as a scientist. I’m still not done.

 
I realized that producing thousands of pages of grant proposals was not satisfying for me, either personally or professionally. The odds were long and not improving. People probably think there’s less in South Texas than there is in Maine.

I also realized that managing those grants I did get were not satisfying for me. I’ve complained for a long time that trying to spend a dollar from a grant requires a bottle of aspirin, because it’s an instant headache.

So I mostly quit writing grants. I’m still writing some pre-proposals for NSF, but none have gotten an invitation for a full proposal.

Instead, I have focused on the bit that I find most satisfying for me: writing papers. I have focused on creating “$5 projects” that can go forward, grant or not. My research doesn’t run on money. It runs on willpower.

And I just submitted a manuscript to a journal today, thank you, that was generated with no grant support at all.

1,017 days: when publishing the paper takes longer than the project

At. Last.

Long ago, in a distant land, I, Zen, a sand crab biologist, unleashed an NSF grant for undergraduate research upon my department. And students applied to this.

In the third REU cohort, Jessica Murph (pictured) ended up working with me. Jessica was looking for a project that involved field work. She asked just at the right time, because I’d been digging up the local sand crab species (Lepidopa benedicti) for a while. I realized how little we knew about the basic biology. People would ask me things like, “How long to they live? What do they eat?” And I’d say, “No idea.”

Because I wasn’t trained as an ecologist, I couldn’t quite figure out how to go about studying the basics of a little animal that was completely concealed in the sand. Ultimately, my former colleague Anita Davelos Baines gave me the idea of digging transects. As long as we did it consistently, we might be able to get some meaningful information.

I asked Jessica to start collecting sand crabs for her REU project. She did, and between her efforts and mine, we got a year’s worth of data, which took her out to the end of her time with the REU program.

I compiled all her data, and was getting ready to write it up and submit it... but I balked. It’s that gut instinct you have to develop as a researcher about whether your own papers are ready. I knew that if I was reviewing this paper, I would say, “One year of data is not enough.” So I continued making monthly trips and collecting sand crabs myself for another year.

Then, I submitted the manuscript to what I thought would be an appropriate journal. This was regional natural history kind of stuff, and fortunately, there is exactly a regional journal dedicated to just such research: The Southwestern Naturalist.

When I mentioned this to one of my colleagues, he groaned a little and said, “They take forever.” I sort of shrugged and said, “I’m not in a hurry.” It’s not as though I am worried about getting scooped on this project: ecology of an obscure species of digging crustacean? Not exactly a “hot” research field. But in retrospect, I wish I had checked the “submitted” and “accepted” dates in a recent issue more closely.

I submitted the paper on 22 August 2011. No, that is not a typo.

When I finally got the page proofs, it chafed my chaps to see the “submitted” date at the end of the paper: “26 September 2011.” Apparently, nobody even looked at this manuscript for over a month.

I got my reviews back on 24 May 2012. That’s nine months there. I sent back the revision one week later, and I hadn’t thought the revisions were that major.

Time passes. Sound of crickets chirping.

My patience ran out around the ten month mark (we’re at February 2013 now). I emailed the associate editor about the status of my manuscript. He emailed me back to say:

I am no longer an editor for the Southwestern Naturalist.

I was gobsmacked. It seemed to me that a logical thing to do when an editor leaves would be to email the authors for correspondence to say, “This person is leaving; please direct your inquiries on your manuscript to this editor.”

I finally heard back that the article has been recommended for publication, and should appear in the December 2013 issue of the journal. This made me happy, because I thought it would be out by the end of the year, and I hadn’t had a lot of papers out in 2013.

In early November, I get an email that I should get page proofs for my article in January... which is already after December, dashing that hope that the article would be out before the end of the year.

With all that’s happened so far, I suppose I should not have been surprised that, having been told to expect proofs in January, I actually get them mid March. I sent them back quickly, in hope that the December, 2013 issue might be out around the end of March, 2014.

In the waiting time between when the paper was supposed to be published and when it actually was published alone, I submitted articles to three other journals, had them accepted, and proofed. I’m not trying to boast here, just contrasting my experience with this journal with others.

The paper has finally seen the light, and it has taken substantially longer to get this article through the editorial and production process (2.75 years) than it did to collect the data and write the paper (two years). I should have seen this coming, because the journal does list the initial submission and acceptance dates. But even those dates underestimate the publication time. My “received” date was a month after I submitted, and the publication date on the cover of the issue, December 2013, was months before the issue actually hit the web.

And, by the way, did I mention that there was a $320 page charge for all of this? And it’s a paywalled subscription journal, with no open access options?

Speaking of costs, I got an email on 19 May 2014 allowing me to order reprints. The paper still wasn’t available on the journal website, but I thought it was at least a promising sign that it hadn’t been forgotten. I clicked on the link, and was stunned to see this part of the ordering form:

They wanted $69.68 from me so that I could have a PDF of my own paper. I had never had a journal want to charge me for a PDF before.

I was also stunned to see that a copy on CD would be more than another $10, when the cost of a blank CD from Staples can be as little as 18 cents. It feels like a money grab. And I can’t remember the last PDF I needed or wanted in CD format. And why would you need a DVD (another $13) for a single journal article PDF?

The paper was finally available online on 4 June 2014. That’s 1,017 days – or two years, nine months, and thirteen days from submission to publication.

This whole process has soured me on submitting to some of these niche journals. That is a shame.

I submitted this article to The Southwestern Naturalist because it seemed to be the most appropriate journal for the paper. I see value in topical journals; it makes things easier to find. I think many researchers have certain journals they check regularly. But after this experience, I think I would have been much better off submitting this paper to PLOS ONE or PeerJ or a similar venue.

Except... wait, PeerJ didn’t exist when I submitted this paper. With publications like PeerJ, journals like The Southwestern Naturalist are going to be in trouble soon.

I feel bad for the staff at The Southwestern Naturalist. They clearly don’t have enough resources. I don’t know whether they don’t have enough people, enough pages, or something else, but these time frames are not signs of a healthy scientific journal. And, as I said, I do think journals like this can serve an important purpose! I want to support the journal. I do.

I’m pleased that the paper is out. Because of this paper, my co-author, Jessica, is more excited and positive looking back on her research experience now than she was when she was doing the work, I think. It gaves me a chance to add another UTPA success story to the REU Bio website. And it is the first to provide any sort of basic ecology for any species in this family. It’s a cute little paper. I love it for what it is: a little natural history on organisms that only a few people in the world care about.

But it’ll be a long time before I think more about the science in the paper than the frustrations and delays in publishing the paper.

Additional, 11 June 2014: The printed copy of the journal arrived today, which is reasonably quickly following the online publication.

Additional, 28 April 2016: I got an email today from the president of Southwestern Naturalists:

On the publication front, [the editors] are well on their way to getting The Southwestern Naturalist back on track. It is anticipated that by the end of 2016, we will be back to our normal publication schedule of 4 issues a year mailed in March, June, September, and December. HOWEVER, we need your help. It seems that some authors have shied away from submitting manuscripts to The Southwestern Naturalist over the past year or so because it was behind in publication. This is no longer the case, so I encourage you to consider submitting to the SWAN and I hope you will pass that word that The Southwestern Naturalist is back!

Reference

Murph JH, Faulkes Z. 2013. Abundance and size of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda: Albuneidae), in South Texas. The Southwestern Naturalist 58(4): 431-434. http://dx.doi.org/10.1894/0038-4909-58.4.431

(And yes, I’m annoyed to have to put that 2013 date in the citation when we’re months into 2014.)

External links

Never go against your gut
Some Things Last A Long Time

Granting credit

One of the main criteria that researchers are evaluated on in academia is grants. I’ve always found this tricky to evaluate.

With authorship of journal articles, you either are an author, or you are not. And there is no limit to the number of authors a paper can have. There are subtleties, to be sure (leading to “co-first author” goofiness), but authorship of papers is is tidy compared to grants.

With grants, you can be the principal investigator (PI), co-principal investigator (co-PI), or senior personnel. With some agencies, you are limited in how many people can fulfill each role. For the agency I know best, you can have one PI, one co-PI, and a finite number of senior personnel. If you have a genuine three part collaboration between three people, two of them are short-changed, and one is short-changed badly.

I’m curious at other universities as to who gets “credit” for promotion and tenure when a grant is awarded. Can only the PI claim credit? Or can the co-PI and senior personnel claim some credit when they go up for promotion or tenure? How much weight do the different levels of grant personnel get given?

Somebody else’s problem

Everyone agrees that peer-reviewed assessment of scientific articles is important. But sometimes it seems that everyone wants it to be somebody else’s problem.

Readers – many scientists, journalists, tenure committees – want it to be the journals’ problem.

Editors want it to be the reviewers’ problem.

Funding agencies want it to be the panels’ problem.

Administrators want it to be the external reviewers’ problem.

Reviewers complain about being inundated with review requests and want it to be other reviewers’ problem.

Almetrics people want it to be the cloud’s problem.

And not just somebody else’s problem, but it has to be the right somebody else. Witness the harumphing and frowning and kvetching about “appropriate channels” when papers get criticized on the blogosphere.

External links

Somebody else’s problem

Proposal precision

At the National Science Foundation workshop I attended earlier this week, there was a lot of discussion about the power of the program director to award grants. As mentioned yesterday, a program director at the NSF doesn’t have go by the rankings of the panel reviewers. (This is rather different than NIH, apparently.)

At least one person was upset with this. During sessions, he asked, “If the program director makes these decisions, then what is the point of the panel?” I thought, “Oooh, green-eyed monster” when I heard that first question. Later, the same person asked, “So the decision is very subjective by the program director?” “It is, but it has to be very well justified,” was the reply.

At the end of the day, waiting for the shuttle, I overheard the same person again expressing his displeasure at the NSF. He said something like, “They are playing with people’s lives, and it’s all so subjective.”

Notwithstanding the undertones of entitlement in this person's comments ("They're giving my money to some researcher whose proposal was worse than mine!"), it seemed to me that this person’s worry was based on a false premise.

He presumed that a panel review can objectively measure the excellence of grant proposals. Indeed, I think he believed not only that the excellence can be measured, but that it can measured to several decimal places, like the roundness of electrons.

There is not that much certainty in evaluating proposals. In fact, there is research evidence that shows that there is a lot of wiggle in proposal evaluation.

I am glad that program directors have the ability to make decisions, rather than slavishly following a formula. While this obviously disappoints people who want to follow an algorithm (“I do X, then Y, revise my P and Q on the resubmission, ergo funding”), they ought to realize that there is no review process without a subjective element.

What’s new at NSF BIO

Earlier this week, I was at a National Science Foundation workshop at The University of Texas Brownsville. Although I’ve been in the region for a while now, this was the first time I’d visited the campus there. There are many handsome buildings, with very strongly Mexican / colonial Spanish architecture.

A large amount of the workshop was spent describing the review process, which surprised me a bit. I’d have thought the NSF staffers would be more concerned about preparation.

Two things emerged as important to the participants, it seemed to me.

The review panels change. Thus, there were a lot of discussions about when a proposal is rejected, should you specifically address the criticisms raised by the reviewers in a revised proposal? There seems to be no definite answer to that; very much a case by case decision.

The program director decides who gets the money. This means that the program directors can, and do, override the reviewers recommendations to some degree. I will have more to say about this in a separate post.

Steve Howell started off with some very basic information about the NSF and the biological directorate. He characterized the budget situation for next year as facing “tough times ahead.”

Howell said that some of the major initiatives in NSF right now are sustainability and clean energy; the interface between biology, math, and physics; and cyberinfrastructure (Howell characterized this as the “data deluge”).

Another major new initiative is the national ecological observatory network (NEON), which just started a couple of days ago. It’s a nationwide remote monitoring system. Howell described it as the biggest investment that the biological division at NSF has made in a long time: $440 million over 10 years.

Howell talked a bit about a program in collaboration with the Gates Foundation called BREAD that supports agricultural research in developing countries (Gates Foundation picks up part of that, because NSF can’t fund outside of the United States). Expect more partnerships with industry and private foundations.

Howell talked about the perception that NSF is too risk averse, and there are a couple of new programs for new evaluations. The “big pitch” is a 2 page pitch that can goes to a separate panel – the idea that there is a panel that won’t get bogged down in the details. Molecular and Cellular Evolution are trying this.

Another one is called the “ideas lab”, where the key is “real time mentoring.” A group of applicants are selected to work on a project, with a panel that does real time mentoring for the proposal. The hope is that groups of people can push into some new frontiers.

The molecular and cell guys (the MCB division only) are moving to an 8 month review cycle instead of the six month turnaround typical of NSF. The reason given in the initial presentation was that NSF wanted to give people a longer time to work on revising proposals, although elsewhere during the workshop  I got the impression that this is also part of a move to try to relieve panelists and reviewers of some of the burden.

Howell also discussed what are known as “Dear colleague” letters. “Dear colleague” letters are important because they give an idea of what NSF wants to fund. These are popular for those working at NSF because it’s easier to clear publication of a letter than an actual grant solicitation.

Looking around at the coffee break, it seems that there are about 2-3 men for every woman. About a third are not white, I would say.

$1.75 million dollars

My institution just put up a press release was just issued concerning the Title V grant I mentioned almost two weeks ago.

Graduate School awarded $1.75 million to transform graduate education - UTPA News

I should explain that the shirt was not in reference to the grant. It was the promo shirt made my the Office of Graduate Studies to promote all the graduate programs here. I joked with Sylvia (right) during the photo shoot that I was “appearing in uniform.”

Shared via AddThis

V for victory... and five... and an old 80s SF series...

I’m the grad program coordinator for my department. I spend a lot of time trying to improve our grad program.

That task might have gotten a bit easier this week.

My university has received a big, chunky Department of Education grant to create graduate opportunities for Hispanic students. It’s a Title V grant (hence the post title). I will probably have my fingers fairly deep for that program for the next few years, I think.

The picture? Just amazed that people thought V was worth redoing. I doubt anyone will be able to match Diana’s fantastic bitchiness (wonderfully played by Jane Badler, R).

Biological costs

Expanding a bit on relative costs of different kinds of research... Something I noticed while at a trip to the pet store to pick up supplies and animals.

• Grass shrimp: 33¢
• Guppy: $3.00
• Mouse: $30.00

That's a hundredfold cost difference in research subjects. Many years ago, I heard researchers say the cost of a single cat was $300, which would make for a thousandfold difference in cost of subjects. And that's not including animal care.

Now, I am not taking shots at the science done using mammals as research subjects. But maybe the recession will create an opportunity for people working on invertebrates to make the case that funding research in invertebrates is very cost efficient way of doing good science.

Hide the poker chips, the boss is coming

This has been a frantic week, mainly due to HESTEC. I've blogged a bit about one of my major commitments, working with our visiting REU mentor and HESTEC speaker François Therrien. (Who, it must be said, rocks.)

And it's not over yet. In some ways, the most frantic and stressful part of the week is tomorrow, when we get a visit from Dr. Arden Bement, who is the director -- that is to say, the big boss man -- of the National Science Foundation. That is, the organization paying for my REU program and some of my Marmorkrebs research.

Gonna have to find a clean shirt to wear tomorrow.

It really is getting harder

One of the things I occasionally get in my mailbox is updates from the National Science Foundation, since it is the agency that I look to most and have worked with most for funding. This morning, a link to a report about the NSF's "human capital" came in. I thought it was about science careers generally, but it turns out to be very specific to NSF employment. I did catch one interesting point:

While NSF’s workforce has grown by eight percent between 2001-2007, during that same time period, proposals submitted to NSF for competitive review grew 40 percent.

So, as expected, more and more people are looking for a piece of a pie that isn't getting any much bigger in a hurry.

Hurt feelings? Are you kidding me?

This story is weird.

The Minnesota Soybean Growers Association and the Minnesota Soybean Research and Promotion Council funded research on biofuels.

The research resulting from this came out in Science, about as high-profile and as prestigious as scientific research gets, indicating that biofuels made the carbon emission situation worse rather than better.

The organizations pull their funding.

Why?

"The university hurt the farmers' feelings, OK? That's probably the best way to say it," said Jim Palmer, executive director of the two groups.

Wow. Just... wow. "Kill the messenger," anyone?

There seems to be a misunderstanding about the difference between giving money to researchers and giving money to, say, PR firms. Researchers have the obligation to publish their results regardless who paid the money.

Can the people in these agencies not see how this kind of action would tempt researchers to do bad science? To withhold information? How taking this action makes them look even worse?

I'm totally gobsmacked. Again, just... wow.

Who owns ideas?

I'm working at the lab today, mostly to write a grant proposal. Now, many people would think I could do that easily from the comfort of home. It's a holiday, there is nobody but nobody else in the building (as far as I can tell), so why not just work at home?

Turns out it's very difficult to do any serious scientific writing (a grant proposal or manuscript) at home, because I constantly need to look up references. When I write something serious, I'm always being forced to track down papers I haven't read before. Or I have to find papers where I've read the abstract, but not the main text.

And I can't get to most of those papers from home.

I can from my lab, because it's a university. And the university has paid various publishers for the right to have electronic access to many of the journals I need to refer to when I do serious scientific writing.

That's a direct consequence of copyright and intellectual property issues, and the business models of scientific publishers, most of which are run by for-profit companies.

This week's Science Show has a really wonderful, thought-provoking set of talks about intellectual property issues. Highly recommended.

Indeed, to harken back to the last post, one of the things I think I've changed my mind about is about intellectual property. I used to be much more supportive of copyright protection overall. Now, I see more and more benefits of a more relaxed attitude towards accessing information, thanks to programs like the one above, Creative Commons (particular Lawrence Lessig's advocacy), the push towards Open Access, and more.

(And in addition to all the stuff about copyright, there's a bonus revelation about just how much power internet computing is using up. I never considered how much juice Google HQ must suck back.)

When "annual" means nine months

I walked into the building today, and haven't seen a single person since. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Bliss.

I spent the morning chunking away on the first annual report of the REU program. This is the first time I've had to submit an annual report to the NSF, and it's a bit weird on a few counts. First, the annual report is due 90 days before the end of the award year. So I'm not actually reporting on a full year's worth of work. Plus, the reporting system is very structured and slightly finicky, about what kind of information you have to present in what order. Still, I think that now that I've gone through it once, it'll be much easier the second time around.

I'm also doing another kind of report -- on student short essays. I'm also grading today, and hope to finish that up before I go home today.

Also on the agenda during this break before classes start again next Monday: animal care, recommendation letters, student research project planning, and maybe some science blogging.

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.

Same ol’ story

Another week. Another grant rejection.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to seriously work on the one grant I do have, and looking at the money. And right away, once I started to look at how the money was divided into all the different categories (operating, travel, scholarships, etc.), I found a $6,000 mistake. Money got stuck in the wrong category. Should be fixed now, but this is why I've been telling people, "The fun and easy part (selecting the students) is over now. Now we actually have to spend the money."

And in another meanwhile, a recent email from a journal I submitted to boasted of an average time of 35 days from submission to decision. I am sorry to be running the average up, since my manuscript is still waiting on a decision at about 100 days and counting.

Other people’s impressions

I've observed an interesting phenomenon this last week and a half. Several times, people have stuck their heads into my office and said something like, “I know you're really busy with the grant...”

What the heck did people think I was doing before I got the grant? That I was just hanging out in my office, reading the latest copy of FHM? Counting the number of little perforations in the ceiling tiles? Arranging the magnetic poetry tiles above my computer?

You get money, you’re assumed to be busy. Interesting.

Back from NSF

Unexpected fact: The outside main floor of the National Science Foundation building has a Quiznos and a bagel shop.

Despite the ugly early start for my flight to the NSF, everything went about as smoothly as could be hoped for. I got there about on time. I got to have lunch at Ruby Tuesday (which we don't have locally, but see ads for all the time).

I got my PocketPC successfully set up for NSF wireless internet access – in fact, the staffer who help me told me she had fun doing it, because she'd never tried to set up their wireless system on a Pocket PC before. I got a tiny bit lost, because the initial poster session was not on the room written on my badge, but again, found the starting poster session in time.

The featured speaker at dinner, Elaine Seymour, was very good, very thought provoking. And just to prove that the scientific community is way too small, met someone at dinner and found we had one degree of separation between us: he knew someone in our department, my buddy Fred.

I never sleep well in hotels, particularly the first night, so I wasn't real pleased that the next day started early and went long. But heard quite a few important things, and had no shortage of things to think about. Another keynote speaker, Tyrone Hayes, was awesome. Although he said to me later he is normally a "PowerPoint maniac," he made absolutely the right choice in ditching all that and delivering a fairly personal talk about his experience being a minority in research, and some of his success in mentoring minorities in research.

After the afternoon sessions finished, I just walked around some of the stores in a nearby mall, and ran into a few workshop participants for dinner at the Rock Bottom Brewery. (They'd been told there was a Macaroni Grill in the mall, but it had shut down!), and ended up talking with several of them in the hotel bar for even longer after getting back to the hotel.

It was really a stupidly long day. But in the morning, I was able to find a place with good croissants for breakfast, which I appreciated. It's so hard to find good croissants in southern Texas...

And since getting back, I've been trying to get this undergrad research program up and ready to run. Many meetings, many emails, many things to plan. I'm quickly finding that I have to be thinking about things that are years away, which is not easy for me. So I look forward to receiving the massive wall calendar / planner I asked for.

Finally

Way back in December, I wrote about a project that I couldn't talk about and some of the excitement I felt about it.

Now I can finally talk about what all that was about.

The National Science Foundation gave us a Research Experiences for Undergraduate grant. This is getting funded in portions, but over $156,000 is set and ready. If the funding to the NSF doesn't collapse, we'll get another year and a bit and the total will be over $284,000.

Hooray.

I've been sitting on that since December. Waiting and watching, hoping that the U.S. Congress will pass a good budget for the NSF. Congress was supposed to pass the NSF budget before Christmas, but didn't. They waited until the last possible second, which was the last day the continuing resolution ran out on 15 February. Much was written about this wait in the pages of Science and elsewhere. The delay was so bad that many funding agencies had to scale back planned projects. Reading those articles was highly nerve-wracking.

But in the end, NSF got a bit of a budget increase, fortunately, when many other federal research agencies got no increase. Whew.

And another thing I mentioned cryptically: an upcoming conference? It's actually a workshop for people running NSF sponsored undergraduate research programs. My flight leaves verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry early tomorrow morning.

It's just a relief to go to a conference knowing that I actually have the award. I would have sucked to go to this workshop not knowing if we were getting it or not.

Playlist for the day: Finally by CeCe Peniston, New Man by Sonic Hub, Food For Songs by Del Amitri, and especially Won More Time by God Made Me Funky.