Walking my dog.
Cooking dinner.
Going to the gym three days a week.
Taking care of my house.
Saying hello to Luca when he comes home at night.
I feel like I shouldn't be doing a single one of these things with this grant I'm trying to put together, but life just doesn't work that way.
I feel like my mentor is giving me a ton of his time, but no matter what it's not enough because I've never written a grant before. And he let's me know that he thinks he's giving me a ton of his time so that I feel bad about asking more questions.
I think he doesn't think I'm working hard. I think he can't understand why things take me so long. That I'm stupid.
I can't keep waking up at 2 in the morning worrying about whether this is going to get done, whether they'll be able to pull my funding out of their asses if it doesn't get done (or if it doesn't get funded), worrying that I'll piss my mentor off if I ask him one too many questions.
I worry that he thinks I'm more trouble than I'm worth.
I hate this. I hate this. I hate this.
12 Pearls of Wisdom:
Ugh sounds super-stressful! You seem like a very hard working and intelligent individual (go non-trads!), I'm sure your mentor knows how lucky they are to have you as an advisee (though it might not seem like it with the stress-goggles on). One day/paragraph at a time right- You can do it! :)
I feel like this post has basically summed up the best and the worst aspects of grad school in one simple scenario...
I'm sorry- I can empathize. Good karma to you for getting everything done.
I hated grad school. I liked it for the first couple of years, but my PI (most definitely not a "mentor") was a hard-core jerk who delighted in making me feel like an idiot. Instead of helping me when I had a hard time with something, he would literally sneer at me and walk away. I should have switched labs, but by the time I realized I wasn't actually being trained by him, I felt like I'd spent too much time on the project to walk away. In retrospect, I should have.
This is the first time you've ever done some of the things you're doing -- there is NO WAY you're going to be good at it without a lot of time, work, and training from someone experienced (like your PI). Sometimes I think they've been doing it so long and it's such second nature that they forget what it was like to learn, and think it should be easy for everyone. But NO ONE thinks writing their first (or fifth!) grant is easy, so don't let your PI make you feel like something is wrong with you when it's difficult. It IS difficult -- why do you think PIs spend so much time and energy on it? My PI doesn't spend a couple of days dashing off a proposal; he labors over it for weeks. And he's been doing it for years! I don't know how many dozens of proposals he's written, but he's good at it.
A big part of your PI's job is to train you. And every trainee is different -- maybe you need more help with grants than some people, but I'm sure you also need less help than they do with other things. If he thinks that you should just magically know how to do everything already, he should go into industry where he won't have students, instead of working at a university. The problem you are having right now is a shortcoming of your PI's, not of yours, even if you're actually not great at writing grants -- he should be helping you, not telling you how much you're imposing on him and wasting his valuable time.
If you haven't already, get as many of his old grants as you can, so that you can see how he likes them to be structured and written. And I know this is easy to say and very hard to actually do, but try not to let it get to you too much. Grants are hard and stressful. That's not a sign of incompetence.
What Ninja said.
And don't second guess yourself. You are obviously doing everything you can to succeed. And you will.
Go OMDG!!!
I work for a University grant funding organization. With that, all pre-proposals, proposals cross my desk; given I likewise see all reviewers' feedback, all ratings come to my email and std dev, avgs are calculated by me.
When I see about 300 per year, I can almost tell which ones will get funded and which ones won't. I know we're not the NIH, CDC, WHO but we are a very large landgranting institution.
If there's something I can help with, let me know :)
Ad2b
Hang in there; can you see the light at the end of the tunnel yet?
I have no doubt from reading your posts this past year that your proposal is going to be funded.
What VetSchool said: It's not like you've done this before, ever, and your mentor knows that, and he should be welcoming your questions, and if he's being a dick, that's on him, not you.
And you don't owe anyone an apology for taking care of yourself. That's just crap.
Thanks for all the supportive comments, guys. I think it will be fine in the end. One of my mentors compared the process of writing a grant to "giving birth to razor blades," so maybe some of my angst is to be expected?
Gah. It's going to be an unpleasant 6 weeks though.
Is med school hellish?
Hon! This sounds totally nightmarishly awful.
Can we hang out this weekend? Or soon? A week of bioethics has given me a lot to complain about. I want to hear you bitch and bitch with you!
Wow, once you're done, how amazing will it be to be able to say you wrote a grant--not one for a summer internship or something, but a real one. Good luck!! It really sucks to have that "i hate this aspect of my life" feeling, but once it's done you will be reborn. (Haven't written a real grant before but i hated my life during residency applications etc and it tricked me into thinking maybe i hate my life. Period. But now that it's over I feel so much better!)
Liz -- This is true! My husband told me that he hadn't even written a grant until he was done with his post-doc.
On the plus side, yes, when this grant is done it will be behind me. On the minus side, the powers that be have already indicated that I will be writing more grants over the course of my time here. I know. It's good practice for life. My thought is the next one will go more smoothly since I will have done one before.... but we'll see.
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