New School Learning Curve

The first days as an Assistant Professor is filled with adrenaline-laced excitement. The anxiousness and eagerness to get to work has you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. New faculty orientation consumes the first days while you are mentally creating prioritizing your checklist: obtaining your institution login information, your new email address, signing up for your parking pass, meeting with your Department Chair and checking out your new office. Your faculty identification card, office layout, computer setup and business card ordering will happen in a few days. The focus is settling into this career path — making that context switch from your previous status as a graduate student, postdoc or other technical professional to an academic.

The first days as an Associate Professor at a new institution is a seemingly echo of your first days as an Assistant Professor. The adrenaline excitement is replaced with  an excited calm. Prior academic work experience makes that aforementioned checklist unnecessary. The systems integration of your credentials and generation of your new affiliation occurs at the pace of the institution. Your inaugural year teaching, research and service expectations are far more reasonable. The academic life can be summed up by solving the Tower of Hanoi puzzle.

Towers of Hanoi Description
The puzzle traditionally has 3 pegs: starting peg, spare peg and destination peg. The starting peg has a user-specified number of disks with the disks stacked from smallest to largest (largest disk at the base of the peg). The object of the puzzle is to systematically move all the disks from the starting peg to the destination peg, but a larger disk can not be placed on top of a smaller disk. The key to solving this puzzle is understanding that the functionality of the pegs alters as you are moving the disks, e.g., when moving a disk, the starting peg operates as the spare peg, the spare peg operates as the destination peg and destination peg operates as the starting peg.

But here's the rub for any new faculty hire:

1. You don't know the number of disks
2. You don't know the number of pegs
3. You don't know which is the starting peg, spare peg and destination peg.

Initially, you can safely assume there are 3 pegs and 9 disks. For the purposes of this example, the disks are stacked service activities at the top, then teaching and lastly research activities at the bottom.

Disk 1: Institution Collegiality
Disk 2: External Collegiality
Disk 3: Course Preparation
Disk 4: Course Modification and Development
Disk 5: Research Team Building
Disk 6: Publications
Disk 7: Conference Attendance
Disk 8: External Grant Writing
Disk 9: Funded Award Management

Disk 1 &2: Institution and external collegiality — The variety and plethora of academic service-related activities has the potential to consume your days (and nights). Be purposeful of which departmental, college-wide and technical program committees you are a member.

Disk 3: Course Preparation — A class lecture is like Showtime at the Apollo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showtime_at_the_Apollo). Depending on your temperament and talent, you select how you will engage students in the course material via a series of slide decks, problem-based learning techniques, flipped classroom or another method altogether. Each class, you are on stage and the students tell you by their (lack of) questions, body language, (lack of) enthusiasm, etc if your teaching approach has resonated. If you instruct a course that tends to interest students, kudos -- course prep becomes a bit easier. Otherwise, I suggest you invest quality time to determine how to relate the material to your student body. Any course can be exciting when the proper care is given to the learning experience. A teacher's excitement about the materials helps fuel a student's deeper curiosity about the course content.

Disk 4: Course Modification and Development — Course material can become stale and outdated. The fundamental course topics can be presented in new ways, new assessment mechanisms can be devised, your prior experience with the course could render you to change the order of course topics. Course evolution through revision or developing a new course is a necessary activity of any faculty member. By evolving your course, you increase your likelihood of students’ remaining engaged in your courses year after year.

Disk 5: Research Team Building — The talent and aptitude to mentor students in research activity is the hallmark of a great research advisor.  Honestly, experience is the best teacher. You have to learn the balance of motivation and criticism, students' temperament and abilities, work effort and work product. I suggest The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth and Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath as good starting points.

Disk 6: Publications — The frequency and quality of your conference papers, journal articles, book chapters and books are common academic metric in assessing a faculty member's national and international influence. The summer months are a great opportunity to complete scholarly work due to the lack of a required teaching responsibility. The co-authorship with fellow colleagues and students is strongly encouraged, in some academic environments, a necessity.

Disk 7: Conference Attendance — Conference registration, attendance and paper presentation are required for publication. The conference talks help keep you current in your field's advances. While the time and cost of conferences can be expensive (see previous post), it is a cornerstone of your branding activities. The reputation for contributing good work to the field and presenting it well will only help in bringing opportunities knocking.

Disk 8: External Grant Writing — When responding to a grant proposal solicitation, the act of actually writing the project objectives, anticipated outcomes, evaluation and assessment plan is a time-intensive, idea-articulation scholarly exercise. The proposal operations can be an added stressor that consists of working with your institution's office of sponsored programs for internal grant submission approval. The coordination of the proposal document, supplemental materials, and colleague collaborations. Grant writing and proposal submission has a high work-effort yielding a low conversion to a funded award, but if awarded, external awards are highly valued in the academic realm.

Disk 9: Funded Award Management — Do your work and do it well.

With great power come great responsibility. ~Voltaire

A funded grant gives the awardees a newfound elevated social currency (aka power) amongst his/her colleagues.  The spotlight turns in your direction to revel in your successes and witness any mishaps. Don't let the award excitement overshadow the necessary work in properly accomplishing the project outcomes.

Research Financing

To execute a funded grant is to manage its budget. My graduate studies experience didn't include project management training: personnel, project deliverables/outcomes, project timelines, budgets, etc. This academic research budget starter kit is intended to spark conversations with your advisor, mentors, advocates and/or colleagues. To provide some concreteness to these budgetary matters, I supply some rough numbers where appropriate, but be sure to check your institution's rates. 

Understanding the inner workings of a research project budget and which expenses can be allocated to which account is just another skill to learn as a faculty member. The NSF provides a proposal budget template to get you started. Each line-item in the budget allocates monies to a specific need for the proposed project. Here's some relevant terminology that if you don't know, you should make it a top priority to know.  

• PI: Principal Investigator, research project director
• co-PI: assistant Principal Investigator, research project co-director
• CY: calendar year, January 1st-December 31st
• AY: academic year, traditionally August 15th-May 15th
• Summer Salary: up to 10 weeks of wages and fringe benefits allocated to personnel during May 15th-August 15th
• FTE: full-time employee
• GA/RA/GRA: graduate assistant, research assistant or graduate research assistant
• F&A: Facilities and Administration fees

Depending on the NSF solicitation, the research team comprises of one PI and up to 4 co-PIs. The distinction between the CY, AY and summary salary may be obvious to some, but just in case it isn’t here are a few comments. CY is a more flexible allocation, in which you can expense the grant monies at any time during the grant period, while AY or summer salary are typically designated to the 9-month academic year or 10-week summer period, respectively. Department Heads (or Chairs) may prefer AY monies allocation. Why? Chairs are primarily concerned about the academic year budget, e.g., how each faculty member is drawing his/her salary from which account, AY teaching assistantship allotments (based on course enrollments), travel and equipment, etc. So you, through your grant, can pay for your own wages and the Chair could re-allocate what would have been your AY salary & fringe benefits to other departmental budgetary activities. Your Chair could hold back these “departmental budget savings” from the AY budget and dispense some of it directly to you as summer salary.

Course buy-out. Each institution decides the flat percentage of a faculty member’s AY salary and fringe benefits that is needed to deliver a course. Each department sets the semester course load expectation. I'm most familiar with a 2-2 teaching load, in which I'm expected to teach 2 of the department's courses per semester. So for the department budget, 4 courses a year means roughly 50% of your employee contribution and duties go toward classroom instruction. The other 50% should be  for mainly research activities and some service. Let''s suppose that your base 9-month salary is $100,000 and the course delivery flat rate is 12.5%. If you have a course buy-out for each year of the grant, the funding agency will pay $12,500 of your salary and not the institution. This $12,500 is used by the Chair, with the assistance of the faculty member, to select and hire a temporary staff member (an adjunct faculty, lecturer or instructor) to deliver that course. An institution may have a flat temporary staff member salary rate of $7,000 per course. Given our example, that $5,500 differential could be re-allocated at the Chair's discretion. Special note to tenure-track faculty: A course buy-out prior to promotion and tenure may be perceived negatively by your promotion and tenure committees because you would not be contributing to the departmental course delivery needs.

Summer salary.  A faculty member has the responsibility to cover their own summer salary. Due to U.S. federal regulations, an employer (institution) can not pay an employee (faculty member) more than 50 consecutive weeks. When grant monies are routed through an institution, faculty summer salary serves an extension of the AY payroll. Thus, a faculty member has a maximum 10-weeks of summer salary to be on the institution's payroll. The advice given to me, and so I give it to you, is to try to allocate a couple of weeks in the summer for every funded project. Most research projects can not be relegated to AY activity. By allocating the summer salary line-item, you can secure pay goes directly to you and guarantee continued funded research project progress over the summer. Assuming your base 9-month salary is $100,000, two-week of summer salary is $5555 (= (100,000/9)/2).  Special note to tenure-track faculty: I would suggest that you reserve some of your summer to writing and submitting your scholarly work to journals and conferences. Be careful of burnout.

Other project personnel. Other senior personnel salary include in your budget are postdoctoral associates, other professionals, graduate and undergraduate students and any support staff. Postdoctoral researchers and other support staff have 12-month position appointment while graduate students are traditionally semester position appointments. Let's take graduate student personnel as an example. A graduate student can be paid as a 0.25 FTE, 0.50 FTE or 0.75 FTE as a teaching or research assistant. At an 0.50 FTE, the graduate student research assistant is expected to contribute 20 hours to the research grant activities. An institution has a fixed semester GRA rate, say $7,000, but there is also graduate fee remission, say $7,000. Graduate fee remission is a form of salary compensation and insurance where graduate employees are not obligated to pay full tuition and fees. The graduate students directly receives the GRA salary while the graduate fee remission is charged by the institution and paid by the grant monies. 

Fringe Benefits. Fringe benefits constitute the institution's charge for staff employee healthcare and other benefits. For each staff employee, the fringe benefits rate, say 27%, is considered a direct cost within a research grant budget. Assuming a 1 course buy-out from your base 9-month $100,000 salary, the salary and fringe benefits charge is $15,875 ($12,500 salary and $3,375 fringe benefits).

F&A: An institution's facilities and administrative are indirect costs charged by the institution to the funding agency. You know, an institution's contribution to infrastructure support of the research, e.g., post-award office personnel, travel and expense management software, the office space, electricity, ethernet and wireless network connection, etc., needed to host the proposed research. At many research institutions, the F&A rate is high, say 54%. You have read that correctly…54%. For every $1.00 you request from the funding agency, $0.54 is requested from the institution. F&A eats into your workable budget, but it is necessary.

So for a budget that a PI/co-PI with a 9-month $100,000 salary requests a course buy-out, 2-weeks summer salary and 1 graduate student for a year, the salary and fringe benefits direct cost is $36,929.85 ($15,875 course buyout, $7054.85 summer salary and $14,000 for 2-semesters of a graduate student) and the indirect cost is $19,942.12. The total cost is $56,871.97.

Whew, and I didn't even talk about domestic and foreign travel for PI meetings/workshops and conference travel or equipment needed to execute the research project! There is so much to learn about the internal and external business operations of your institution.

Final thoughts:

1. Meet with your institution's pre-award grant office personnel
2. Meet with with your institution’s business office personnel
3. Meet with your institution's post-award grant office personnel 
4. Maintain a good working relationship with your pre-award, post-award and business office personnel

Scaffolding the Grant Writing Process

The grant writing and submission process is very much like the research process, e.g., "a meandering slow and fast, exciting and dull, frustrating and rewarding process over time and mostly in collaboration with colleagues”. The discussion of research grants can in no way can be handled sufficiently in a blog post, workshops, books or through human to human conversations. You only learn through experiencing it.

There is having a research project idea, there is effectively communicating that idea and there is receiving money to execute that idea. In the first year as an Assistant Professor, I was utterly blown away by the amount of time, brain-clock-cycles and knowledge about grant writing needed to just complete a proposal - let alone be awarded the funding. A flurry of questions swirled in my brain: How do I write a project summary or project description? What is appropriate to include in the project budget?  Why do I need to justify the budget in the facilities, equipment and other resources document? Is there a template for the biographical sketch? Can I see samples of biographical sketches, project summary and project description? Can I even do this? Who can mentor and guide me? I am just not prepared to do this. Why didn’t I learn these skills in graduate school or through my postdoctoral position? Was I just not paying attention?
 
Ok, OVERWHLEMED!
First, breathe deeply.
Second, continue reading.

I will speak on the National Science Foundation (NSF) funding stream given my familiarity with this government agency as a grant writer, grant awardee and proposal review panelist. NSF is divided into a number of directorates (or discipline-specific funding units), where computing falls into the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). CISE has 4 divisions: Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ACI), Computing & Communication Foundations (CCF), Computer and Network Systems (CNS) and Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS). Each division manages grant competitions and funded awards through program directors and officers. 

For most grant writers, you are answering a call-for-proposal (CFP) solicitation. Now, I find NSF CFPs to be a cryptic read with some informative content. The General Information provides the list of program officers assigned to the proposal competition - a great point-of-contact to filter your proposal ideas to gauge the appropriateness of your proposal to the CFP. The Proposal Preparation and Submission Instructions tells you if a letter of intent and/or primary proposal is required aside from the full proposal and the associated deadlines. The Introduction and Program Description sections are intended to provide potential proposers’ insight into what NSF is aiming to address. The remaining of the CFP is all about process - award & eligibility information, proposal preparation and submission instructions, review procedures and award administration information. In total, an NSF CFP is about 10 pages with very small print and large side margins.
  IMHO, the grant writing process is akin to cooking. A recipe is really just a guideline, a suggestion of how to make food taste great (to the recipe creator). You have a recipe. Most people follow most of the cooking instructions. Most people use most of the ingredients.

Ingredients: 
1 very good to execellent idea
1 PI
Up to 4 coPIs
1-page project summary 
Up to a 15-page project description
list of cited references
Up to 5 PI and coPI biographical sketches
1 data management plan
1 budget document for project duration
1 budget justification
1 facilities, equipment and other document
(X) other personnel (post doctoral scholars, graduate students, undergraduate students, etc.)

Instructions: 
Regardless of if you are responding to an CFP or submitting an unsolicited proposal, successful research grants are about having the right people, addressing a timely problem and effectively executing a reasonable implementation plan within the funding timeframe. Start with talking to colleagues within and outside your discipline. People are so creative and discuss some very good approaches to open research problems. The plan can only be achieved when motivated, commonly goal-focused people decide to devise and then implement the plan. Does this sound difficult? Well, yes it is. The people-problem-plan triad is crucial to manage.   

The overall intent of the grant proposal is to supply clear and sustainable outcomes for your technical community while responding to this discipline’s science needs outlined by the NSF’s CFP and/or mission. The project summary has 3 parts: overview (mission and vision), intellectual merit (contributions) and broader impacts (sustainability). The project description is an expanded version of the project summary with a background, related work, research plan, tentative project timeline, evaluation & assessment, and qualifications of the research team. The budget, budget justification, data management plan and facilities, equipment and other documents are dictated by the NSF CFP, research team, project goals & outcomes. Consider incorporating the following components to your grant proposal: 

Godspeed!

To laugh (or cry) about one of my grant writing experiences, read Grant Submission: A Funny Story

Grant Submission: A Funny Story

originally posted on April 10, 2014 on csdoctorsister.blog.com

One of the continuous activities of a faculty member, aside from teaching, research and service, is that of writing grant proposals. The grant proposers hope the project will be funded and it will lead to other funded grants. It’s a deep-thinking, intellectually stimulating, yet time-consuming process. I’ll save the grant writing process for another post. Anywho, here’s the story:

The set-up: It’s March 2013.
The Transportation Research Board (TRB) posts the grant solicitation: Freight Transportation Data Architecture: Data Element Dictionary.

• Grant Max Funding Amount: $500,000
• Grant Duration: 18 months
• Estimated Grant Start Date: 7/31/2013
• Proposal Due: April 19, 2013 at 4:30PM, 20 single-bound copies delivered to the TRB office

The grant project has a deliverable of a “searchable and sustainable web-based freight transportation analysis to be hosted at the U.S. Department of Transportation”. The TRB’s solicitation format include the project tasks and phases.

The story details: Fast forward a few weeks. I’m asked to scope the data management and data search tasks with collaborators: Transportation SMEs (subject-matter experts) Bruce C Hartman and Christopher Clott and Supply Chain SMEs Edie Schmidt and Regena Scott. I winded up serving as the project’s Principal Investigator.

A few weeks passed and over 10K words later, we had a complete grant proposal about improving the data model for the U.S. government transportation industry.

It’s April 18, 2013 at 12:00PM.

The Purdue pre-award sponsored programs office created the 20 bound copies.  A complete grant proposal has a number of elements, including project plan, references, research biographies and letters of support, and makes it quite lengthy. So 20 bound copies were divided and placed in two boxes. These boxes were sent from the Purdue pre-award sponsored office to the TRB.

The punch-line: The boxes left the office together, arrived at the Washington D.C. shipping facility at the same time, yet were separated, to then be delivered to the same final destination on the same day. One box arrived at TRB on 4/19/2013 at 10:30AM. The other box arrived at TRB on 4/19/2013 at 4:43PM. The second box was 13 minutes late. The grant proposal was not even reviewed. The shipping and delivery company failed my colleagues and me. So hilarious that it is not. I mean, why did the TRB even want paper copies anyways? Digital versions would have been so much cheaper!

Here is an excerpt from our introduction. (Hopefully, at least someone will read our work.)

Effective decision making in the freight transportation industry is severely limited by the disparate definitions used by the wide range of data sources – federal, state, regional sources as well as private and public. The objective of this research is to remedy this problem by producing a searchable and sustainable web-based freight data element dictionary for transportation analysis. A standardized approach that is used throughout the nation will significantly improve the transferability of freight information at any scale – ranging from a single cargo box to an entire train bed.

Our multidisciplinary team of researchers from Purdue University and the University of St. Francis (USF) is proposing to develop a searchable, web-based data dictionary of elements suitable for the National Freight Database Architecture.  This feature will allow users to find data elements relevant to taxonomy elements and see details about them. Other search criteria will also be developed and use cases will also be presented. An additional outcome of our work will be a comprehensive report detailing the data sources studied and recommended, the taxonomy defined, the entities documented, and the hierarchical layout of the data elements, and functional relationships between data from different sources. Finally, our research team will produce a technical paper and conference presentation, with the goal of explaining the scope of the project and providing an overview of the data dictionary.