Grants — embarrassing question

[foralurker]

I hate to ask this, but here goes...

I'm a fresh PhD in my first faculty job. When I was hired, I was told that I should try to collaborate with people who had grants. And while it would be nice if I got some grants myself, it wasn't expected. I also have zero experience with grants or even applying for them.

Now half way into my first academic year, I'm feeling pressured to find grant money. But here's the problem: I don't understand what I need money for. I don't need money. I don't need to buy anything and I can't fathom what I would budget for.

In anticipation of incoming questions, here's some info:

* My research is on college teaching and requires no equipment
* My department provided all of the software I needed
* Start up funds covered all of my office equipment
* My contract has me covered for teaching fall, spring, and summer so I don't need to cover my salary
* I guess I could hire a GA, but I have no clue what work I could give them


I have half a dozen studies under my belt with manuscripts either published or in press. I incurred no cost in any of them. I can't imagine asking for thousands of dollars in grant money. What am I not understanding? I feel absolutely stupid anytime someone asks if I'm applying for grants.

[ergative]

 Here are the things a grant can get you:

-Teaching buy-out. If you're not teaching classes, because your grant is paying for a replacement, you can do more research. Even just paying someone to grade your papers is a huge help.

-Travel: Yes, yes, I know, but in the timeline of grant applications this will be on the table again. Conferences? Collaborations with colleagues in other institutions? Bigger projects that you can't do on your own?

-Networking: What about organizing a conference or workshop in which you invite all your favourite research colleagues to come together and talk about your topic?

-Staff: This is a big one. Are there any really large questions you want to ask, any really large projects you want to run? Not picking away at your pet topic, but developing a new research agenda? Getting that rolling takes a lot of work hours, and if you have RAs or post-docs you can pay them to help get that off the ground. Maybe you could even fund some PhD students. Bringing postdocs and PhD students into your department does great things for its intellectual environment, because once you hit critical capacity new ideas and projects start sparking, and things can get quite lively. I did my PhD in a lab where we didn't quite have that critical capacity, despite my advisor's best attempts, but my postdoc and current institution do have a living lab, and the difference is really striking. If you can get money to bring your lab (research group, whatever) to life by bringing in new people, that is wonderful.

It soudns like you're still thinking of research in PhD terms: What can I do all by myself, as an independent researcher? But now you can think bigger: What can I do as the leader of a team of researchers? Grants will allow you to assemble your team.

[Katrina Gulliver]

Yes all of what was stated. Plus publication fees (don't know your subfield but some journals charge, or charge to make articles open access).
For your book (if you're in a book field) grants can pay for graphics - illustrations, maps, tables, etc.

When you say your previous research cost nothing: no, it cost YOUR TIME. Which has a dollar value.

[arcturus]

Grants pay for labor: do you need to code your data? You can pay hourly wages for someone to do that for you. Do you plan to involve students in your research? [The answer should be yes.] How do you plan to pay them? Undergraduate summer research stipends; graduate student research stipends (including tuition and health insurance); a week or two of your own summer salary. It all adds up quite quickly. So, yes, it sounds like your research *could* be done on a shoe-string budget, but you will be more successful if you can create a vibrant research group, and that is best done with access to grant funds.

[Hibush]

Good advice above.

First, you will need to figure out how big and impactful your research program is expected to be. That is likely one reason it has been recommended that you collaborate with someone who is doing grant supported research. From that, you'll start to get an idea of what staff and collaborators you'd need.

Second, you will figure out how to staff and budget that kind of project. This is where your mentor will be essential. Developing a grant together makes it worth their time, you each get some of the money and you each provide some of the research to the end goal. You end up learning by doing. The whole thing is so complex, I can't imagine learning enough any other way.

I'll reinforce that the main cost is labor. If you are teaching every term, there is no way you have time to do enough research by yourself to meet expectations in a research-active department.

Undergraduate researchers are really important. They may not be the most productive staff, but that experience really enhances the undergraduate program. I pay mine $16.50/hr to stay above minimum wage. A student working 10 hours a week for a semester costs my grant, with employer taxes and indirect costs, a bit north of $4,000.

If you are working with other institutions in your research, perhaps the teachers trying the method, you need to be covering some costs there. Don't assume they can participate in your work for free.

[mamselle]

And it needs to be noted somewhere along the line that this is one of the huge differences, still, between the humanities and the sciences...the former are playing a 20-year-delayed catch-up game to the latter in thinking through this. (Corrollary: Schools would respect and work harder to keep humanities programs if they brought in more grant funds, I believe.)

I got grants for my humanities grad work (a few decades ago) because I'd seen, during my EA employment in science labs and pharmas, how it was done, and had helped file the NSF submissions. My profs at the time were both surprised, that I could do it, and basically clueless, one even said, "I've never gotten a grant in my life." 

I was funded for 6 mo. total over two years, in France, working on early liturgical MSs: after I'd applied for, but not received a Fulbright, an art historian in the slide library put me onto a little endowment fund that accepted my proposal. I'm giving two papers this spring on "splinters" (little segments cut out of the original text) from that work, in fact.

It's less unusual now, the humanities having taken that page from the sciences, but as has been noted here, even undergraduates were being folded into research projects then, in the labs and tropical rainforest research and policy sites involved. The guy in our cohort who covered the Bosnian war as a journalist and interviewed some dangerous people only got travel reimbursement funds to cover the blindfolded midnight ride on a jeep to the fellow's lair when his thesis ended up being focused on the topic.

But that's how a newish humanities Ph. D. wouldn't know the things a science-y MS has already written for and participated in. The developed culture still lags a far ways behind.

If you make a virtue of being inexpensive, as others above have pointed out, those who primarily assign value by the number of dollar signs attached will mentally downgrade you or not take you seriously.

M.

[Ruralguy]

Also, you say your research is on college teaching. Is this area specific or just general? No matter for the moment, but many disciplines and professional societies, in addition to what is available via NSF, etc..  have grants related  to disseminating your study and what you have to offer. That may depend on what it is exactly, but especially if your research can be "sold" as a tangible product, you can get grants to pay for, well anything, but specially for seminars on getting out the info, etc..  That's just something for you to mull over, OP.

[mamselle]

Yeah.

Just ask Eric Mazur.

M.

[polly_mer]

Also, you say your research is on college teaching. Is this area specific or just general? No matter for the moment, but many disciplines and professional societies, in addition to what is available via NSF, etc..  have grants related  to disseminating your study and what you have to offer. That may depend on what it is exactly, but especially if your research can be "sold" as a tangible product, you can get grants to pay for, well anything, but specially for seminars on getting out the info, etc..  That's just something for you to mull over, OP.

A great starting collaboration could be doing supervision of the assessment of the outreach/education portion of someone else's grant.  That's another possible use for an undergrad researcher.

I will also mention that start-up funds don't replenish and therefore all future software computing needs need new funds.

[Parasaurolophus]

Don't forget that you can hire a postdoc, too! You don't need them to be directly involved in anything, they could just be producing related research  of their own under your auspices (a lot of humanities postdocs work that way). The added research opportunity is good for your subfield, and good for your department's reputation. Plus, it's nice to have someone to talk to who shares your interests.

You could also use the money to fund a workshop or conference on topics related to your research. Funding agencies seem to like that, especially when it comes to under-appreciated topics. You could even pitch it with a view to producing an edited collection from the contributions.

[Ruralguy]

Yes, and just because your school is *willing* to pay for a computer every so often and software, etc. doesn't mean that they wouldn't mind if a grant covered it instead and with greater frequency.

[darkstarrynight]

I really like the opportunity to hire a graduate research assistant or two and give them experience with research, presenting, and writing. On my last grant, I was able to hire two students in different years (as one left the institution to run for office). Before the pandemic, I was able to bring our collaborator from a different institution in another state to our campus for some activities related to the project since the rest of the grant team is here.

I posted a link to some free workshops in the public scholarship thread, one of which is on grant writing if you can spare an hour in late April.

[foralurker]

Thanks, everyone. This was incredibly helpful.

I feel like I can ask some intelligent questions now. :-)

[the_geneticist]

Do you need a statistician or other analyst? Does your research use any sort of consumable supplies (printing costs, bubble forms, etc.)?  Where do you store your data (hard drives? cloud storage?)?  How about professional development training for you or your research team?  All of those things cost money too. 

[KiUlv]

I really appreciate your question and the responses! I had a similar question, so I'm happy to see some responses.