Dear person who I emailed to ask for help on my grant, on which you would be a co-author:
I know you were at work yesterday because my friend said she saw you in your office. Now, can you please tell me why you couldn't be bothered to respond to my email? Either:
1) Yes I can help, let's set up a time.
2) No I cannot help.
Would be awesome.
Gah! It's BS like this that makes me worried about getting this project done in time! Why people at this GD institution consider themselves above replying to an email within 72 hours is beyond me.
3 Pearls of Wisdom:
I seriously totally agree with you. Not getting a reply is the worst, because you start thinking: maybe my email didn't make it, maybe they deleted it by accident, maybe it's in their spam filter somewhere out there and it's lost... all not to think the obvious: they're ignoring me.
As I sit at my desk with a hoopla of graduate student proposal reviews and proposals to sort through, one thing with THESE that has caught my attention:
Do exactly as the granting org requests.
If the organization for which you are submitting asks for copies in a certain format, in a certain quantity, or titled a certain way, just do it. It might seem silly, or backa##wards, or what-not but in OUR case, the way these are processed is manual enough.
I'm staring at over 60 proposals that came in mostly the way we'd asked but now I have to spend about 4 hours going back and redoing the titling, abstracts, attachments of those that did not. Total time processing, reviewing, manually taking care of these proposals as well as getting the feedback organized, calculated, etc not to mention soreness quality of right lower arm... is about 10 hours.
How happy do you think I am with these submitters? :D
I have little direct say into the scoring and/or who gets grants, but I do make my opinion known to my boss who happens to be the director of the entire org... and me thinketh, HE has input :)
YOU will be fine with your grant! As for the dorks that are not responding, Karma!
I recently interviewed at a pharmacy school and was mildly perplexed at their communication methods. I received precisely one email from them, everything else was via phone calls.
Come to find out, from other students, that the profs at the school prefer not to use e-mail. They will either call someone or mail a letter rather than e-mail if they can.
Now tell me, what freakin' sense does that make?
Post a Comment