torontotron

I highly recommend everyone go do a headstand (if you have a spot that is)

It's gotta be before 5pm (these are not grad students, jobs are 9-5pm, common), if not then it's going to be a-day/many days late!!!

Ugh! I know! It's both a disgusting reminder and completely aggravating that it still stands alone. As if 6 months isn't long enough to wait for your ONE PAGE PROPOSAL to be appraised, GAWLL!!!

Oh, torturous morning .... Just tried to do a PCR, hands were shaking so badly I had to just shut that whole thing down and put everything back in the fridge. Ahhh!!!! Good luck everyone!!!

That's so kind of you guys! This will be my third CIHR result, 2nd cycle (Vanier + CIHR rejection last year), despite having pretty good rankings, I seem to always just miss the cut off. It's easy to take it personally, I even went last year to many workshops hosted by my school which evaluate your application pre-submission (evaluations by profs who actually ARE ON the CIHR review panels), they told me my application was fantastic, and still it was rejected. But, you've got to make some internal justification for the fact that although it is a structured multi-tier process of review, you really have no control over who reads and ranks your applications. You could catch someone on a bad day and they could rank you poorly. You could get unlucky and have reviewers who actually don't understand or see the merit of your project, where all others would (this happens in peer review publishing aaaalllll the time). Worse, you could get someone who hates your PI for personal reasons (entirely entirely possible) and will rank you low - I think this especially happens in close competitive fields such as my own (neural stem cell biology). And, at the end of it all, the fact that it relies on artificially constructed numbered categories in order to administer the award, and not narrowing down processes and discussions (ie for the PI's operating grants there are actually reviewers sitting in a room face to face discussing each individual proposal, but in the end it still is a number) I think ends up really hurting fantastic applications and can put way too much emphasis on one weak point in an otherwise excellent package. Anyway, this is just me psyching myself up for more rejection. Good luck everyone!!

woman

If there's one thing y'all can be sure of - results for a government competition will NEVER come out on a weekend. It takes these guys 7 months to review a few pieces of paper, and half of the applications are thrown out at the get-go for a GPA to low, or margins too wide. Work is clearly NOT taking place on weekends. PLUS these people are unionized up the ying yang = no weekend work. Bureaucracy runs thicker than Alberta tar sludge over at the magical CIHR/NSERC/SSHERC castle.