It’s that time of year… an occasional series of posts addressing issues that come up at particular points in the academic year. Grant deadlines. Beginning of term. End of term. Starting new jobs. I’ll address seasonal topics, with advice to help reduce your stress and work effectively towards your research goals.
This post: Receiving the decision on your SSHRC Standard Research Grant application
Did you apply for a Standard Research Grant (SRG) last October? You probably heard last week about the result, even though written notification, with comments, scores and all the rest, usually takes a few more weeks to come.
If you were successful.
CONGRATULATIONS! You now have more resources to achieve your research goals. (If not you can skip down to the next section. I’ve got help for you, too.)
Now the hard part comes in. You actually have to do more research and write more. You need to manage research assitants. Manage a budget. Arrange research trips. Do all the things that you haven’t been able to do because you didn’t have the money.
But before you can do all that, you have to get the money released into your account. That means getting the ethics approval and doing any other administrative tasks the university requires. If you don’t know what that is, talk to someone in the research office right away. Remember, they are responsible for ensuring that all the policies and procedures are followed. Yes it’ll be bureaucratic, but they are there to help you.
Next, get out your application and remind yourself of what you were going to do. Figure out what you’ve managed to do in the months since you submitted the application and any other things that have changed in your plans. The amount awarded might also differ from the amount you requested. That’s fine. There could be lots of reasons for that. It was a rough budget anyway.
You might want to write a fresh plan with a detailed budget that you can use to help you manage the research. If you have a graduate student with project management experience, you might want to hire them as a research assistant to help with this part of the project. Or hire someone who isn’t a student to do that specific task. As long as your new plan has the same objectives as the application, you are okay to make changes.
Now hire a research assistant and get going on year one of the project. Once you get that marking finished, you are going to want to dive right in. Have fun. You are on your way to doing what you always dreamed this job would be about.
If you weren’t successful
I’m really sorry. That always feels like a kick in the guts. But don’t take it personally. About 2/3 of the applicants weren’t successful. There just isn’t enough money in the budget. I’m sure you have an excellent project there.
This is a bit like the Olympics. Everyone who goes is a world class athlete but they only give medals to the top 3 in each event. Disappointing, but not the end of the world.
It is probably going to take some time to absorb the comments and figure out what to do next. There are a lot of pieces of paper in that package you received with your decision. Scores. Summaries. Commitee comments. External assessors’ comments.
And some of that stuff is written in bureacratic safety speak. You know, the kind of thing you write when you want to give reasons and helpful feedback but you also need to avoid people making appeals? Like the letters that Human Resources send out to unsuccessful job applicants. Helpful enough that you don’t want them to stop sending them. But obscure enough to be maddening.
So don’t worry if it all just seems unfair and awful at first. Take some time to absorb the news. And when you are ready, come back to it and this post, and I’ll help you get something useful from it.
Your score
This is important. And it is found at the bottom of the page that has the commitee comments on it. You will have a score for your record of achievement and another for the project. Both of these will be out of 6.
You can use these two scores to identify which aspect of your application needs more work. If your record of achievement score is low, it doesn’t matter how much you improve the project proposal, you still won’t get funding.
Those scores are relative. They are really only meaningful in the context of that committee in that year. They are a means of ranking applicants in relation to each other.
There will be a total score out of 12 but it won’t be the sum of the two scores out of 6. This is because the record of achievement counts for more. But your score out of 12, when compared to the “score of the last funded application” on the summary page, can help you work out how far away you were. If you were in the middle third, called the “alternate list” or “4A”, you will also have a rank. Again, this helps you work out whether you were so close that you don’t need to do much before reapplying or whether you need to make substantial improvements to be competitive.
Your Options
If you were close, you will probably want to resubmit in October. Check that some of the forthcoming publications are now out and that there are a couple more things in the pipeline. And maybe spend a week tidying up the proposal part. But, depending on how close you were, you don’t want to spend the whole summer tweaking details. Your perfectionist tendencies can quickly turn into a liability here. Set a limit for how much time you will spend on this and then just get on with other research and writing projects over the summer.
If you were further off, and your record of achievement score is the problem, you might want to wait a year before reapplying. Look at your updated publications list and try to self-assess how much of an improvement there is. If your publications are still a bit light (either in number or in the quality of the journals or presses where you have published) then put the application aside. Get out your writing plan and spend the summer working on a few more pieces. Aim to submit at least two things by the end of the summer and have at least one more to the stage where it needs lots of little stuff doing that you can do in term time. If you have some internal research funds, hire an RA to help with literature reviews (or at least producing annotated bibliographies), fact checking, reference checking, proofing, getting the finished version into the prefered style of the journal you are targetting, etc.
If the problem was the project proposal, you may be able to resubmit in October or you may want to wait a year. If it is primarily that you did not communicate clearly enough, rewrite the proposal, addressing the committee’s concerns, and try again. Get feedback from colleagues. Try to make time to do some other writing and research, too.
If the committee has issues with the methodology or feels that the project is not well developed enough, you might want to devote this summer to conducting some preliminary research to strengthen the proposal before resubmitting. Making preliminary visits to archives to familiarize yourself with the holdings can be very beneficial to a future application, and might give you some material to work on in the meantime. Conducting pilot interviews or testing a survey instrument and then refining the data collection methods can also make a big difference. Even conducting some preliminary analyses on pilot data can help. Again, if you have internal funds, hire a research assistant to help with some of this.
Need help?
I am offering a webinar, Now What?, to guide you through the package of comments and help you figure out your next steps. My goal is to reduce the stress caused by uncertainty and help you come up with a workable plan to achieve your research goals. In it I will go through the various scores and comments with you helping you work out how to get the most out of them. I’ll also go into more detail about your options. And you will have an opportunity to ask questions about your specific situation.
You will also receive copies of two e-books. Publish or Perish? focuses on your record of achievement, explaining how your publications list is evaluated and helping you make a writing and publishing plan (read an excerpt here). Writing Your SSHRC Grant Proposal focuses on the research proposal part of the application. In it, I guide you through the various appendices to an application helping you communicate your proposal effectively.
The presentation is scheduled for 90 minutes to allow plenty of time for questions and discussion. You will need a phone and a computer connected to the internet. Details of the call-in number and how to view the Power Point slides will be sent on registration. You will need to pay long-distance charges in addition to the course fee. (If you are reading this in an e-mail or feed reader, you need to click through to purchase.)
Thursday May 7, 1 p.m Eastern Daylight Time $60
Monday June 15, 1 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time $60
Want more info about the webinar: click here.
