...in a perfectly typical cross-eyed, screaming M-town style Cluster-Fuck it turns out that the Co-PI on the grant I'm writing isn't actually Faculty yet. He's an associate director of one of our Cancer Institutes, has been working here for several years, and already has funding. We don't even pay him anything, the entire appointment is virtually an honorific to make getting funding easier.
We're fucking broke because the state slashed our budget. We're under pressure to get funding which is why I, a fucking neuroscientist, am trying to write a grant on development of a fucking pharmacogenomic tissue database, and the fucking powers that be won't make the damned PI a fucking faculty member!
I now have to have two drafts of the grant, one routing all the patient-data collection through the cancer institute, and one through the community unit. I need two sets of Letters of Support, and two fucking budgets.
I have five days to finish this white-elephant and the important "Research Design" section is about 200 fucking words long. Because no one knows how we're going to do it yet!
I haven't slept for two weeks, I'm smoking nearly 40 fucking cigarettes a day and I now have a semi-permanent nervous tick over one eye.
Professor in Training and my junior faculty friends are very aware of how I feel right now. For any non-scientist reading this, try and imagine a huge fucking cluster fuck with jobs on the line. Like, I dunno, the car industry or something.
Sweet home Alabama [2]
5 days ago
4 comments:
The first thing we do, is sack all the admin staff...
*ducks*
Thanks Shakespere!
I feel your pain. I'm working my ass off to get grants out the door while the tenured faculty try to cut me off at the knees because any success I may have will only make their minimal contribution to our dept even more obvious. My only saving grace right now is that the admin staff have been incredibly supportive ... oh, and the fact that I ate half a bag of Doritos last night helped lift my spirits too!
It gets worse. There'll be another post soon... Clincian is now back as a PI, and one PI is now a Co-I. And unhappy.
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