I’ve got this cool idea
Think about it everyday
Put it in a proposal
Then NSF took my idea awaaaay
I’ve got the review blues…
We got some surprising reviews back yesterday on a proposal to NSF Polar Programs. We weren’t funded. No surprise there, the proposal funding rate across NSF is about 25 %, though I’m not sure of the exact number for the program we submitted to*. The project that we proposed was pretty ambitious; the surprise was in the positive nature of most of the reviews. As befitting the overseer of most of the nation’s basic research dollars, and as described in their merit review criteria, NSF relies on a highly scientific, quantitative scoring system consisting of “very poor”, “poor”, “fair”, “good”, and “excellent”. “Fair” means your proposal was really bad. “Good” means a reviewer really didn’t like something. Many reviewers seem reluctant to be overly complementary with “excellent”, and too disparaging with “good”, and settle for the ambiguous “very good”. Here’s how we stacked up:
Reviewer 1: Very good, good – (i.e. 25 % of the way between good and excellent?)
Reviewer 2: Very good
Reviewer 3: Very good
Reviewer 4: Good 🙁
Reviewer 5: Very good
Reviewer 6: Very good
Reviewer 7: Excellent (woohoo!)
Reviewer 8: Very good
We got some really good feedback from the reviewers (thanks to all of you!), and thankfully I’m on fellowship – so no need to break out the emergency ramen noodle ration. Proposals for the next Polar Programs call are due in April, time to get busy with a rewrite…
*Using hyper-advanced NSF math, an abstraction similar to congressional budget math, NSF claims that, on average, each investigator receives an award for every 2.3 that they submit. I’m probably missing something, but it isn’t clear to me how to reconcile that number with the low proposal funding rate.
