I have a meeting on Monday for an hour. The head of the branch of DOE where I submitted a long ass proposal is coming to the lab to give a presentation about the proposal process. Preliminarily I was stoked about this and hoped for maybe an opportunity to at least shake his hand and introduce myself. I had thought that my white paper being selected for a lifecycle plan gave me a pretty good shot of funding.
I am less convinced today. There were 375 lifecycle plans from around the US submitted. Selection of finalists will not be completed until the end of July. So in the meantime I am hoping that my one page "quad sheet" is sufficient to grab the attention of the congressional staffers who will sit on the committee. Ugh. Why is it so hard to get a grant funded? (Why is it so hard to convince the government to give me $1.8 million of tax payer funds to do research with over 4 years? When put that way, I get it.)
I normally don't have a defeatist attitude. Work in this field for 3 years on other people's stupid ass projects that go nowhere and do nothing other than re-engineer previous generation instruments for millions of dollars received for talking fast, being vague and projecting an air of self importance, and that defeatist attitude becomes commonplace.
I am starting to think private industry is the place for me. (My other meeting on Monday is with the labs patent lawyers on two patents my shiny happy project is submitting in conjunction with our industry partner - I am even the lead on one. Yay!)
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