Meeting about grant proposals

At 3:14 last Tuesday, I was in a meeting about grant proposals.

Part of my job as an Associate Dean is to learn about, and then enforce, picky rules.  One of the things I've been learning is that the picky, annoying rules aren't proliferating on just my campus; it's part of a nationwide thing.  Big Business has long complained about governmental regulation, and now academic research is getting a taste of that same medicine.

My mom was a physicist, and I grew up in a house hearing her and my father talk about writing proposals. I think I knew what grant proposals were long before I knew what marriage proposals were. I know that they took up a lot of my mother's life.

Who would've thought that someday I would be part of the process of other people writing grant proposals? Even weirder, is this: when you write a grant proposal to try to make the world a better place, you think that the obstacles and the difficulties are going to be out there somewhere, in the larger world. You don't think that the obstacles and difficulties are going to be inside your own house, tripping you on your own floor rug for electrocuting you in your own wall sockets. 

After the meeting was over, late at night, I was thinking back to 3:14, and I wrote to the person trying to pull together the proposal. 

Trust me, I very much appreciate your reactions to just how challenging this whole process has been in so many ways.

Given all that, I just want to remind you that I think that what you are doing is amazing, wonderful, much needed, and transformative. I'm so glad that you have the courage and persistence to keep plugging ahead right now, and anything that I can do to help, I will continue to do.

That's all. I wanted you to know this. Please reach out if you need a pep talk or even more tangible assistance, and thank you both again for letting me have a front row (or second row) seat to this adventure.