Comment by danielmorozoff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danielmorozoff | Hacker News Reader

Having written NSF grants and other grants - DARPA etc. I have won some and lost many. I compiled a few non obvious takeaways:

- Story telling is everything. It seems this is a huge lesson never taught in grad school.

- Technical details sometimes work against you. The author is absolutely right that getting the general thought process across is crucial.

- Who you get on your review committee tends to significantly skew the outcome. Can make or break your chances.

- I have known a lot of groundbreaking work funded by other money for these exact reasons. Sometimes good science is too far afield for people to understand. An anecdote i like from recent times is how Eric Betzig built the super res microscope. Here's the background.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/04/quitting-failures-a-...

TLDR: he won the Nobel...

The sad truth is $500k for a career grant seems like a lot when you're in the university, but when you get out and see where else money is being spent you realize how poor academia really is.

> The sad truth is $500k for a career grant seems like a lot when you're in the university, but when you get out and see where else money is being spent you realize how poor academia really is.

It's not just about the $500k, it's about the freedom to do your project your way from start to finish. I can't get $500k from any investors to do my work; their number one question is what's their ROI, which is not even in the universe of my concerns. The last thing I ever want to think about is how to profit from my research.

Another choice is to join a company and then convince that company my idea is worth while. If I get the greenlight to go ahead that's great, but then I'm still always living under the threat of being fired or the project getting canned. Any University is happy to have a CAREER recipient, and your award is portable between institutions.

And sure you'd possibly be able to convince your company to sponsor a project you're interested in leading, but the for something like $500k you'd better have a good business case for it, and I can't imagine them approving something that would last 5 years unless it really aligns with their business goals. In order to get the clout to actually ask for this kind of project you'd also need to be at the company for a while, whereas something like a CAREER award is intended for early-career faculty. Imagine going up to your boss and saying: "You know that job you hired me for? I'd like you to keep paying me my regular salary, but I'd also like $500k to work on my own pet project about 70% of the time from September to May, and 100% over the summer. Oh, and I'd like to do this for the next 5 years."

Respectfully, I disagree. The point you make about financial freedom, imho is an illusion. A few thoughts on your first point.

The NSF Career grant affords you the latitude to pursue your research interests, but those are inevitably aligned with the academic process as you are in pursuit of tenure. So you need to publish and you need to produce publishable work- very unlikely you will choose only high risk moonshot projects as your likelihood of receiving tenure is directly correlated to those publications. Furthermore, your statement that the NSF or the university is not an investor, is also flawed imo. The NSF specifically asks for impact as it ties the money it allots a research to economic impact to the US- as it should since it is tax payer money. I.e your investor is the US. A similar argument can be drawn to the university that provides you startup lab funds- their long term goal is to receive publications/ patents/ prestige they can the monetize against through either selling those ideas/ receiving royalties or donations go their foundations. As you become a more famous researcher you also attract more masters students who pay a good deal of money to go to school there. They are in fact your investor only expecting a different ROI...

As for companies- how much do you think an engineer or ml researcher costs per year to a company especially the caliber in a Phd lab? 500k expense is pretty small. your assumption that a company wont give you 500k to fo work is an illusion- they do it's just not hard cash, they spend on resources that you use. An average PhD level base salary at a Fang - 200+k plus bonus/ equity closing on over 300k?

So the real question is pick your poison.

Good points!

To the first point, starting in 2017 the Career solicitation dropped the tenure track requirement. I’m not tenure track and I have no aspiration of perusing tenure.

Your point is taken about there being “investors” no matter what, but the expectations of those groups couldn’t be any more different. NSF is happy if you spend your money on grad students. The idea of building a research program that is attractive to paying masters students is a far different prospect from building a profit making venture. I’m quite comfortable talking about and demonstrating the broad impacts of my work, but those impacts don’t include making investors a boatload of money in terms of selling a product. That’s just not in the cards. And to put a finer point on it, I’m much more comfortable with my investors being the general American public and my country as opposed to principally rich people.

To your second point, I agree that it costs a lot for a company to hire an ML engineer as an employee. But I would say it is not typical for a a researcher with maybe only a couple years of experience post grad school to be offered $500k to work on any project of their own choosing for 5 years (or more, let’s just be clear that $500k is like the minimum you’re even aloud to request for a career award).

I mean, maybe that is happening, I’ve honestly never heard of that. Does anyone here have that kind of arrangement, or have you heard of anyone who has been able to pull that off? Would be very interested to know how to approach a company to convince them of that. Pay me a salary, give me $500k, let me work on whatever I want for 5 years at my own direction, and that would sound comparable to the kind of freedom you get with a career award.

`The sad truth is $500k for a career grant seems like a lot when you're in the university, but when you get out and see where else money is being spent you realize how poor academia really is.`

This hits me every now and again.

But your first point is huge, and one thing we've been working on with our program's grant writing class. Students phone in their specific aims pages to go write their approach sections, which is what they're working on, and that's a huge mistake.

The takeaways are very true. I would go further to say that not only is the story telling and the scientific vision a very important part of the sell, the language and terminology needs to be in sync with the reviewers. Often times researchers write very technical details in the proposal that is hard to parse and backfires.

In non-blind proposals, pre-communication is the key.

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