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MrRoots

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  • Application Season
    2013 Spring

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  1. I feel like the BI section is so subjective. As a former Peace Corps Volunteer and years of domestic community outreach in the policy arena (switching to biophysical sciences) I am not really sure how much more robust a person can get as it relates to broader impacts and/or the potential for future broader impacts. I had a few criticisms about my BI not being explicit enough about how I would include women and other underrepresented groups. The final reviewer said that I didn't address the broader impacts beyond the applied value of my work. The BI portion of my research was focused on whether different agronomic management systems would be able to increase yield/livelihoods for smallholder farmers and involving the community in the experimental design setup as well as data collection (the basic science questions were related to mechanisms surrounding N cycling). Anyhow; I recognize that the IM of my application may not be competitive with others but its really difficult to believe that anyone who has worked on the front lines of domestic or international development would not have the potential to continue to do so in the future would not inherently have a competitive BI. Anyhow, just my rant; I guess working with communities to produce more food and understand the mechanisms behind management systems just isn't BI enough for some. I guess the comments are the double edged sword compared to other grants that we apply for. We want them but when we get them were can't understand how they didn't see that our proposals were the best thing ever?! LoL good luck to everyone next year and congrats to the rest!
  2. Don't do your PhD there then...likely to not get hired by your degree granting institution unless you leave for awhile.
  3. Correct; the distinction is pretty clear here (UC Davis)...TA's run sections, discussions and/or labs as well as do grading and readers just grade. There are occasions when that isn't the case and it may vary from department to department but the pay for TA's is much better and comes with full instate tuition waiver, health insurance and a pretty good stipend. Readers just get an hourly rate less than the TA's. And yes; if the hiring committee sees that a candidate has only been a reader or the equivalent it doesn't do much for that candidate.
  4. Interesting... I know all of these things are relative on field, school, PI etc. etc. But a condition of getting departmental funding similar to the GRF at UC Davis's Plant Science department is that you TA for at least one quarter as a Masters student and at least two quarters as a PhD student. Some might think this offsets the cost to the department, and it does, but the department chair is a big proponent of students TA'ing per the fact that all faculty in our department have dual research and teaching appointments. Apparently the lack of teaching experience has been a deal breaker in job candidates being offered positions here as well. Most of the professors I know also are proponents of their students TA'ing because they suggest that it actually makes graduate students better researchers because they have to answer critical questions from undergraduates which can really help develop our research questions. I would also suggest that TA'ing after the first few years would be much more manageable as most of the required for a graduate students program would likely be out of the way only leaving research and TA'ing a bit. Lastly, if need to take qualifying exams, there probably isn't a better way to prepare oneself for those than if you have to teach the material. You are correct though, it isn't easy and there are plenty of reasons to argue that we shouldn't have to do it all. I hope I get the GRF but even if I do, I would likely still TA or at least help organize a few seminars. Good luck!
  5. References and ONLY references at the end of the document can be 10pt.
  6. If you read the solicitation it will give you the details but I know that you can't hold two at once and I believe you may defer for a year but don't quote that. Good luck.
  7. While I was hopeful it would get pushed back there isn't really much justification for it for most applicants. Unless someone is living in some remote part of the world with little internet access (like I was last year) I can't really see why they would as all of the resources were still available we just weren't able to upload anything. There are always exceptions but it still seems pretty reasonable to me. Now, if the date for submission is the same but the award notification date got pushed back that would sour me quite a bit!
  8. I was mistaken...its the 'Predoctoral' fellowship not the dissertation one.
  9. Hey All, Some of you may be interested in this: http://sites.nationalacademies.org/pga/fordfellowships/ I was interested but it seems like one of the required criterion (for the predissertation fellowship) is that the applicant must be a from an undeserved demographic...is my reading of this wrong? For some reason I thought I knew people that didn't fit this description who have been awarded this fellowship.
  10. Need some advice...I need a general opinion where agricultural science proposals would go for the panel? My proposal is looking at yield response to different fertility treatments in rice-maize systems in the developing world. Its rather applied but I've been encouraged to apply by a number of professors...just trying to get an idea of which panel would be best. I'm thinking of switching the thing being looked at to soil organic matter as this is a bit more basic and possibly a better approach.
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