6 thoughts on “Poll: Cat Vacuuming”

  1. I recommend rejecting any and all proposals which employ the words “transformative”, “revolutionary”, “synergy” or the phrases “paradigm shift” or “cutting edge”.

  3. Been there, done that. I worked several times on the tutorial advisory committee for an information security conference. The due date for the reviews was always the 4th of July. So, whichever day was our holiday at work was spent in an undisclosed location finishing the tutorial reviews.

    I’ll bet your 6 grant proposals are a lot more work than my ~25 tutorial proposals.

    I don’t have a t-shirt, though. I’ll have to mention that to the tutorial chair of the conference….

  5. Thankfully I only have 5 proposals to read for Sunday, and I’ve skimmed them all. Unfortunately, that was long enough ago that I’ve forgotten most of my thoughts.

    But I still have to write a final for tomorrow morning and attend a two-hour meeting this afternoon and meet with the students in lab. So I’ll be starting on the proposals tomorrow, and working through Saturday and Sunday.

    So, answer 1 for now, and answer 4 starting tomorrow.

  6. I have five to review — in 4 different fields. Maybe they think I’m an expert in each, but one of them is from my PhD field over 10 years ago, and two others are in fields that I only worked in briefly, so that’s hardly the truth.

    So on the proposals that I know best, I’m being very thorough. On the others, well, I’m being pretty generic but sending a note to the PM why that is (yes, I should I declined these when I first received them 3 months ago, but I didn’t look at them until now, assuming that as in years past they’d give me ones in the field I’ve done for the past 7 years).

    Time to go hide.

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