{"id":186,"date":"2008-05-14T23:31:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-14T23:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2008\/05\/14\/post-grant-wind-down\/"},"modified":"2008-05-14T23:31:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-14T23:31:00","slug":"post-grant-wind-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2008\/05\/14\/post-grant-wind-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-grant wind-down"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Aaaaahhhhh.<\/p>\n<p>That was me relaxing. I&#8217;m drinking a nice cuppa tea and everything.<\/p>\n<p>Due to technical problems with the funding body&#8217;s website, last week&#8217;s grant deadline got pushed back to today. This was a good thing, because it allowed us to spend much more time tweaking and revising the application, but it was also a bad thing, because it allowed us to spend much more time tweaking and revising the application. It&#8217;s funny how these things expand to fill the time allotted to them. I sent the grant to our institute&#8217;s coordinator for his sign-off last night, and the damn thing is officially submitted and off my desk as of this morning.<\/p>\n<p>Believe it or not, I actually quite enjoy the rush &#8211; as long as I&#8217;m confident that we&#8217;ll actually get things done in time &#8211; and at least the work is interesting and useful. My last job managed to be both stressful <em>and <\/em>boring (lots of repetitive work with very tight deadlines), and when I took this job I made a mental note to remember how horrid that combination was during the inevitable stressful times ahead.<\/p>\n<p>This job being a constant cycle between super-busy and more laid-back, today is wind-down time. In my usual tradition, I have spent the day:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Attending a very interesting seminar (I tend to skip them when deadlines strike, and missed some good ones this month)<\/li>\n<li>Tidying my desk, although Mermaid will still be able to recognise it as mine without checking the photos and tea mugs<\/li>\n<li>Printing hard copies of all final grant sections, and filing them away<\/li>\n<li>Printing and archiving all of my early drafts \/ edits of each section (I like to give it a week or two and then compare my versions to the final ones approved by the grant&#8217;s authors &#8211; it&#8217;s a good learning experience to see what they decided to keep \/ edit \/ rewrite \/ scrap entirely. This time around there&#8217;s a pretty good mix of the four options, with one section completely unchanged from my first draft!) <\/li>\n<li>Organising and archiving my email inbox<\/li>\n<li>Having lunch with the whole lab for the first time (fun! And yummy! So full!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Things still to do:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Meet a friend from my old job for a quick beer after work<\/li>\n<li>Go home and play with the kitties<\/li>\n<li>Get through the night without thinking or dreaming about the bloody grant<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The whole cycle starts again next week with a meeting involving the two PIs of a potential new grant submission. And my boss wants to see all the information I have on a huge project that isn&#8217;t coming along as well as we&#8217;d both like, due to the big grant time-suck. But it&#8217;s nice to have just one day to organise my desk, my files, and my thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Aaaaahhhhh. That was me relaxing. I&#8217;m drinking a nice cuppa tea and everything. Due to technical problems with the funding body&#8217;s website, last week&#8217;s grant deadline got pushed back to today. This was a good thing, because it allowed us &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2008\/05\/14\/post-grant-wind-down\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,48,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-career","category-grant-wrangling","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}