Scientific research is labor-intensive and therefore expensive. After you become a professor in some scientific field, there is often a requirement that you secure federal or industrial or some other type of external funding for your research projects, or at least there is an expectation that you submit proposals and try to get external funding. In my case, the external funding is used primarily to pay the salaries of my group members. External funding also pays for the computing hardware & software that we need, and it pays for some of the support that we receive from the local computing center. Finally, external funding pays me a part-time or—in a particularly good year—a full-time salary for the summer. I’m on a 10-month NY State contract, which comes with 9 months of salary in a given academic year. (I found that a bit confusing, too, at first.)
Writing research proposals is therefore an extremely important part of academic life. It is also rather time-consuming. Requirements vary a lot depending on the field, so I don’t have generic advice. However, I was struck by the following statement in the memoir of the late Christopher Hitchens, which captures one particular aspect of the grant cycle beautifully:
“[T]here is no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.” (Christopher Hitchens, in Hitch-22: A Memoir)
© 2023 J. Autschbach.