Next time, try not to cut it so close...

Proposal done with less than 11 minutes to spare. Required some fairly elaborate racking down of some other people, since two people involved in some way were both out of town today. Just awaiting electronic submission now. But it looks like this proposal is going to make it in, albeit under the wire. Whew...

Additional: Submitted with 4 minutes, 29 seconds to spare.

Good thoughts

A post to let former fellow grad student Mary Anne know that I'm sending her positive thought vibes as she interviews for a new job.

Deadlines

The current grant proposal I'm working on may not be the biggest I've submitted, but it is easily the most complex. I have four co-principle investigators (two was my previous record), have been working with architects, physical plant, and others... yeesh. The practical upshot of all this is that rather than being done a couple of days in advance, this thing is due at 5:00 pm today, and there is still some information missing from the proposal. That doesn't make me very happy, but I'm hopeful that I can pull this off somehow.

Defenses

Another busy day today. I was sitting down for the defenses of two Honors undergraduates. One was a student who I supervised, Yajaira, who gave a very confident presentation. You would never have known we were making changes to her presentation only 20 or 30 minutes before her talk! After her defense, I learned she was a former Miss Rio Grande Valley or some such thing. Explains the poise; she's used to standing in front of people.

Second student was Tina, who actually did most of her research off at Louisiana State University as a summer research project. She also did a good job, although we were lamenting a bit about the level of assistance she got from her supervisor at LSU. It sounds like her supervisor may not have given her quite as much help as she could have. But as someone always pressed for time myself, I can see how that would happen.

But my contributions are nothing compared to my colleague Scott Gunn, who is either supervising or being on the committee for sixteen, count 'em, sixteen undergraduate Honors thesis. He broke the old record of twelve in one semester, a record that was previously held by... himself! And yes, he was on the committee for both of the students today.

You may be an assistant professor if...

You receive an receipt for a program application that you had completely forgotten writing and submitting. That happened to me yesterday; I got an email from HACU about my application for their "Professions Capacity Building" program. I dug around on my hard drive and sure enough, there was the short two page application I had written up and submitted back in February when the request for applications was made. I had totally forgotten about it.

Meanwhile, I am soon to be up against the wall for my latest NSF application, which is due in a week and a half. Unfortunately, I'm depending on other people to provide me with information, which they haven't done yet. I'm getting nervous about it.

Denied!

Another day, another rejection letter, this one from the NSF. They didn't like my proposal for Neurobiology Methods enough, so back in for resubmission it will go.

In other news... I've been busy. Hence, no posts. The fun never stops in Zen's world.