DG2010 – Sept. 28 Post Recap
Last week, I started to dip into the NSERC Discovery grant budget development process.
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Here is a recap of last week’s posts:
DG2010 – Evaluation Changes reviewed some of the changes to the evaluation process for the Discovery grant competition. I have had a few comments on this post via email regarding a misunderstanding of how the binning process will be applied. I am working on clarifying my understanding so that I can post a refined view of how this will work (or did work last year).
DG2008 & DG2009 Scatter Plots is a quick view of the scatter plot slide from the NSERC DG2010 information sessions. This data provides a bit more context to the Evaluation Changes post.
DG2010 – Building a (Normal!) Budget describes the importance of linking the budget request with the actual research work planned. Links to sites for calculating the budget ranges for GSCs from previous competitions and the NSERC Awards Search Engine are included.
Discovery Grants – Budget Breakdowns revists a post from The Accidental Mathematician on how research budgets are spent in math and stats.
DG2010 – Budget Rules of Thumb is an updated post from the last DG competition summarizing collected wisdom on budgetary rules of thumb. Be advised not to take these rules of thumb for face value — be sure to critically analyze whether these assumptions make sense for your research.
As mentioned in the notes for the Evaluation Changes posts, I am working on clarifying my understanding of the binning process and hope to provide updates soon. If you have any thoughts or knowledge of the process feel free to drop me a line!
I haven’t written all the posts for the rest of this week yet, so I don’t have a preview of what is coming up next. Stay tuned!
On “normal” budgets, I often say that the budget is the proposal written in accountant. We might not speak accountant but that is a minor hurdle.
So the important thing is that if you say you will do it, there should be resources in the budget or the committee will discount that aspect of the proposal. No money means you aren’t really going to do it.
Also at the application stage you are proposing a budget, it should match the proposed research. Accept that if/when you actually get the money, you will write a new budget to guide your actual expenditures based on the amount awarded and your research priorities.
That is a great point Jove. The proposal budget is exactly that – a proposal. When (if) the funds flow, an entirely new budget will have to be developed based on the actual award.
By the way, I’m so delighted to find a SSHRC specialist! Thanks for making the connection.