I am wondering if there is a scaling relation between the size of a grant and the administrative overhead/workload associated with it. My limited experience is that the relevant exponent is much less than one.
Small grants (especially travel grants of a few thousand $) seem to require comparable administration (pages of application, contract, memoranda of "understanding", special visas, progress reports, final reports, press releases, ....) as grants of several hundred thousand $. This administrative overhead is not just a burden on the scientist but wastes the money of the funding agency and university who are paying support staff to administer the grant.
Due to this large admin overhead I generally don't bother with small grants. However, I recently did successfully apply for one, partly for political and kudos reasons, and have been really struck by the problem.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Elastic interactions and complex patterns in binary systems
One of the many beauties of condensed matter physics is that it can reveal and illuminate how two systems or phenomena that at first appear ...
-
This week Nobel Prizes will be announced. I have not done predictions since 2020 . This is a fun exercise. It is also good to reflect on w... -
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro... -
Nitrogen fluoride (NF) seems like a very simple molecule and you would think it would very well understood, particularly as it is small enou...
No comments:
Post a Comment