Read on Twitter
Gather round grant seeking kids. Grampa has a sekrit tip about why you need to get on study section.
Yes, yes you get to witness study section dynamics first hand. And members of the section you are going to be reviewed by again some day get to take your measure. Not that.
Being able to see how many PIs structure their grants is good, sure. As is seeing for yourself just what cramming the pages full does to you as the reviewer, very key yes agree. It’s something else.
That amazing feeling that you get when you think maybe you are being too harsh on an assigned application only to find out in Read phase that the other two reviewers came in with the same score +/-1.....very nice but not the thing.
This thing goes in your motivation bag. Not getting a good score gets you down, correct? A little bummed. Maybe a string of NDs has you convinced your science just isn’t of interest to the NIH?
It’s hard to keep those grants going out of your shop after the 10th or 20th disappointment. I know. No it doesn’t get any better.
But something else helps.
But you have to be on study section to see it.
But you have to be on study section to see it.
On study section, you get some idea of what gets funded. Maybe you have some competing continuations on the first submission and you get to see the summary statement including the score and percentile.
And while you don’t know how a panel vote will go, what the percentile ranks will turn out to be and which of the current grants will get funded....you’ll have a good close bet when the post discussion range is established.
Or maybe it will be a SEP and you will get the very strong sense Program is going to fund 1 or 3 awards no matter what the scores are.
It is almost inevitable that you will experience the following:
“AYKMRN??? Those people are funded for THIS????”
You can do at least that good, right? And most of your grants are clearly way better than that garbage.
Get back in there and keep swinging.
“AYKMRN??? Those people are funded for THIS????”
You can do at least that good, right? And most of your grants are clearly way better than that garbage.
Get back in there and keep swinging.
Fin.
