zlacker

>>karako+(OP)
The people I know who work in life sciences R&D (basically anything bio) have had their funding absolutely annihilated. PhDs with 20 years of experience working second jobs as substitute high school teachers, lab workers taking up tech support positions paying a fraction of what was already terrible pay.

What's worse is that in most of these fields, you don't really even start working until after your PhD.

4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.

>>bane+ye
Our lab is scrambling, spending all our time writing grants, not conducting science. It is so frustrating and wasteful.

>>Subicu+Oh
This was true when I was a grad student, decades ago. It was true when I worked in a lab as an undergraduate before that.

Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.

>>timr+kw
But clearly there was some science going on. Any time spent writing grants rather than doing research feels wasteful, but it's the way to get funding. The percentage of time spent doing that is changing, and the percentage of grants applications that get funding is going way down, demonstrating a big change in the amount of effort that goes directly to waste. Unfunded grants are not evidence of bad research that does not get funded, but merely of the funding level.

>>epista+nx
Science gets done by the people you hire with the money you raise. And yes, everyone in a group is always thinking about the next grant.

I’m not joking. I’m not exaggerating. This is the job, and it’s always been this way (at least in my lifetime). Maybe it’s worse because of the current administration, but complaining that academic life is mostly about grant writing is like a fish complaining about water.

>>timr+jy
Undoubtedly the complaints are constant, but that is not evidence that the amount of work wasted on unsuccessful grant proposals is constant.