I’m currently 0-3 in terms of graduate fellowships; I applied for the NSF fellowship twice, and the Deparment of Defense’s fellowship once (in retrospect, probably hopeless from the start, but amusing proposal looking back; I tried to twist my project into a way to invent better sensors for chemical weapons? Nice.), and got neither.

This caused me to worry a bit, for a couple of reasons. First, if you can’t figure out how to bring in money as a scientist, that’s a problem. Equally troubling, though, is that the reviews I received for those applications (I’m thinking specifically of the NSF) seemed pretty capricious. Example: the first year I applied, the reviewers thought the stuff I had listed for community service, etc. were great. The second year I applied, I got ripped for not having enough community service, etc., even though I actually had MORE things to list for both of these things compared to the year before. Huh? Also, I think by the time you were finished, the application wound up containing more information about how often you tutored underprivileged students in college or “communicated science to the public” or how early you were elected to Phi Beta Kappa than the actual details about your scientific proposal. Kind of a bummer. And I’m not saying that those things aren’t important for a scientist, or for any good citizen with a knowledge of science, to do; I’m just saying that it felt like the selection process was more focused on those aspects of one’s CV than one’s potential (or demonstrated ability) to actually produce quality work in the lab.

Then, like a ray of light from the heavens, the NRSA fellowship appeared. Now, I never expected to take solace in the NIH grantwriting process, but you know what? I actually think it’s a decent way to go about funding people. Sure, I was fairly happy with my score, and I didn’t have any enemies in my study section (somehow), and I didn’t have to complete anything close to an entire RO1 application. But I actually felt like people who knew something about neuroscience read the damn thing; the issues they had were totally reasonable within the context of the experiments outlined. I don’t have enough preliminary data demonstrating I can achieve that goal? Fair. I’ll have to get you some more. The interpretation of those results could be problematic? That’s true. I’ll have to take that into consideration.

Yeah, it takes a lot of time to do the application; yes, you have to be able to demonstrate that you can actually do what you propose; and sure, the topic has to be (or has to be spun convincingly to appear) at least mildly health-oriented. But all I wanted was for someone to judge me and my proposal objectively on our scientific merits, and that’s what I got. Thank you, NIH. Now tell me if I’m funded already, I can only check the era commons website so many times a day before I start to feel bad.