Grant application wisdom.


I read through a stack of long grant applications recently.  I’m on the committee, like I was last time we gave this funding out and like I almost definitely will not be the next time.  I have discovered some pointers for grant applications, and I don’t mean these facetiously.

1) Be careful who you’re nice to.  You never know who’s on a grant committee.  That person you blew off two autumns ago might be the deciding vote on your so-so grant application.

2) There really will be some stickler who judges you for typos, formatting errors (everyone knows by now that Word 2007 does to spacing) and spelling mistakes.

3) The quality of your writing really does matter.  Maybe there is no real connection between the ability to produce serious, quality, formal writing and completing a proposed project.  But there sure is the implicit perception.  “Don’t fun that.  He can’t even use a thesaurus.”  There’s worse, too.

4) It does make a difference if you staple, paperclip, merely stack or use a report cover.  Not connecting  your papers at all makes readers find the beginning and end of your application and might have them annoyed when they start reading it.

5) BE CONCISE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

6) When asked for a very short statement about your project, don’t just paste your opening two sentences.

7) Don’t call yourself “visionary” in the third person when the application has your signature on it.

8) Don’t list the grant criteria, say that your project fulfills them all, and then not say how or why.

9) Shorthand and abbreviations are unwelcome in an essay that is asking for thousands of dollars.

10) Realize that when you ask for mos of a grant for salary (“consulting”) for yourself when you already work 40 hours a week and will do all the grant work during those 40 hours, that’s called stealing.  You will get rejected, maybe laughed at.  And, you know, people remember you the following year.

Don’t ask me for positive recommendations, or how to actually get a grant.  Sheesh.  If I could do that, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.  I get paid under a grant, but I didn’t apply for it.

Too much wisdom literature.

gracian1208
A few years ago, my friend sent me a copy of Baltasar Gracián‘s The Art of Worldly Wisdom. It is, by the way, excellent reading. It calls to mind Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations, and I mean that in a very good way.  I was reading it a bit last night, and of course, I was struck by just how damned smart and relevant the maxims still are today.

I was also struck by how I was reading them: as interesting bits of information.  Not wisdom — interesting paragraphs.  I thought that, perhaps, it was the text.  Maybe it’s not as awesome as I thought.  But I’ve noticed in recent months and years that I seem to gloss over even my favorites like Thoreau, the Buddha, Emerson, Nietzsche, et al. Am I getting dense?  I don’t think so — though that is certainly a possibility, and there are certainly people who would say so.  (Ahem.)  I suspect that this is a result of studying philosophy for my entire adult life.

On the one hand, I think I might be somewhat numb to wisdom literature!  I’ve read so many wise things that other people have written and acted on so little of it that it’s all just a bunch of clever words most of the time.  When Aurelius reminds us that stupid people act stupidly and that we waste time and energy being upset about it, I still get upset when selfish people act that way.  How else do selfish people act?  Selfishly!

On the other hand, my philosophical undertakings have largely been academic ones.  By that I mean that I also read and have read immense amounts of bullshit.  We don’t act on philosophy; we write about it! And then we read about it and then write about that.  And then read that and write about what’s been written about, etc.  I think a part of me suspects that all wisdom and philosophy that we can read or learn from other people is just bullshit.

Am I claiming that a piece of philosophy that no one acts on is bullshit?  Yes.  Read some of my graduate papers that pissed off some of my professors (I was, after all, attacking their profession).  I’ve felt that way for a long time, and that’s a large part of the reason I decided not to pursue a career in academic philosophy. Why, then, did I pursue a doctorate?  I don’t know.  You imagine that you might be a different case, that you can keep your integrity and still gitterdunn.  Maybe I thought I would feel differently or that I might be wrong.  Maybe I was just too stupid and stubborn to stop.  That’s certainly the case now, where I’m finishing my PhD just to finish it and justify my time, energy and debt. (And, for the record, I got offered a spot teaching my own class at the exact school I always dreamed of teaching at just after my dissertation prospectus defense.  So, ahem, for the record, I didn’t simply wimp out of the search for a job.  I might have hurt the feelings of someone I care about who was looking out for me, too. I don’t know if I ever mentioned this.)

What’s my point?  I don’t know.  Maybe that the bullshit that gets forced on people in the academic discipline of philosophy poisons us against actually acting in a wiser fashion because the bullshit gets mixed in with the “real” wisdom (assuming that some of philosophy is actually wisdom literature, which I think is true).  I have known tons and tons of philosophers, and only a scant few of them acted like wiser people for their study of philosophy.  More likely, we just turn into snarky smartasses.  I wish I could count myself among the people who have studied philosophy and thereby act wiser for it.  Maybe it’s not philosophy.  Maybe it’s me.  Maybe it’s a flaw in the “type” of person who chooses to study philosophy for a living, since so few of us do anything about philosophy.  But something’s amiss.

To the three lazy Freshman riding one floor on the elevator.

Rode the elevator today with three Freshman boys who joked with one another, “We’re lazy!”  They went up one floor.  Who am I to rag on someone taking the elevator?  Someone with 14, count ‘em 14 flights of stairs. They even walked past the steps 20 yards to get to the elevator.  You’re wasting your money with all that Ass, I mean Axe, body spray ya’ll drench yourselves in.  Nothing, I mean NOTHING will get you laid like avoiding two flights of stairs. Nothing!

F in DC, two years ago, and other things.

fwash07_0909
I like the blues in this shot.  That’s all.

And.

Had an event directed toward connecting campus and community tonight, with four higher eds and Central Baltimore.  I work at one higher ed as an AmeriCorps type.  (Well, I’m assigned there.)  My wife works at another of the higher eds.  We both had to go to the same event tonight. Professionally.  As in, we were separated all night because we were there on business.  Each of us. We didn’t even walk up together because I went with someone from my institution (and because we had to score some caffeine first).  Bizarre to be physically near but apart from someone you share a bed with. I suppose it was beneficial to have the distance to step back. And to see how awesome my wife is and how…excellent she is at everything she tries to do. Being so close to the awesomeness, it’s not that you/I don’t see it. You/I just see it differently. Details. Not the breadth. That’s what I mean. You know what I mean.

Funny moment: When someone came up to us at the end as we were leaving (we did leave together and ride the bus home together after all), with a furrowed brow and said (tentatively) at the realization that we have the same last name, “You two have a connection….?….” Yeah, like I have a common last night? (I don’t.) Maybe it’s because we’re a different color? I don’t wanna think that. Not tonight.

Other funny moment: My pal ate a pizza with what looked like tiny octopi on it. Pulled one off and ate it and exclaimed, “AGH! This doesn’t taste like octopus!” It was squid. And she knows what octopus tastes like. Oh. My.

Also ran into my favorite socialist bike folks, with a Starbucks cup in my hand.  Shame.  Seriously.

Art School Conformos.

So I was at a, ahem, local art institute this morning, at one of their on-campus coffee shops.  I was surrounded by about two dozen undergraduate art students.  It was the one dressed entirely in Abercrombie and Fitch who didn’t look like everyone else.  This is funny.  At least my pal who is an alum of this school assures me that it goes away as the degree progresses.

I think it’s funny.  And, yes.  I came through a major with a “uniform,” too.  Guess what the Philosophy Major Uniform was in 1997-2001!