NSF CAREER Grant UPDATE Thread

[lightofhope]

Finally my Career status changed to "recommended"!

[ocean2428]

Your DOE career proposal, was it this year or last year?

Just saw my reviews, and totally discouraged. the program office invited the most negative and grumpy reviewer of the last round to review the proposal again (he gave good last round and fair this round), and the person's rating destroyed the whole thing. the person wrote an extremely long page of criticism that doesn't make any sense (already read it the third time) and these comments clearly indicate that the person did not bother reading the proposal, not even the most essential part. He said there was no proof of the concept, while evidence was listed in one major figure. The saddest thing is that this person is obviously very "powerful" in the field and you don't know who this person is and not having a chance to challenge his wrong accusations face to face. (Is inviting the most grumpy reviewer again a way the PO unfavors/destroys a proposal?) there are two other reviewers who gave excellent. All the rest gave useless generic comments and very good/good and good ratings. I have a feeling those generic comments come from viewing at my institution and my website instead of actually reading my proposal. They were just not impressed with "me". I admit I have my own prejudice here. This is heartbreaking how my Career application journey ended. I lost faith in NSF, not because I did not get the award, but because how my proposed work was treated in this round. I got no useful comments other than a stamp on me that I will not accept. From the last two rounds of reviews, it also seems NSF is not willing to fund innovative work with low-moderate risk. Rather they fund those who have done the same thing for years and years. Career is not meant to help one to establish a career in a new thing, but rather, is meant to award the past glories. I understood it wrong from the very beginning. 

Thanks for all the useful comments here. Good luck to all in the community.

My first and only DOE early career proposal was declined. One of the reviewers said that this guy did A, B, and C ... I have never worked on A, B, and C, and these things are totally not related to my research and certainly were not mentioned in my proposal at all. I talked to the DOE PM about it. The PM gave me a standard response that next time you should make it very clear what you did in the past in the proposal so that you would not be mistaken as another guy. PM thought maybe the reviewer confused my name with another guy. But that's it. The PM couldn't do anything.