Timelies all!

I tend to like Spring the best of the seasons. Temps in the 70s, sunny, things are blooming...that's my idea of a good day.

(Of course here it's hot and humid, as fitting a place built on a swamp)

I do think "pre award" is hilarious, if you're talking about competitive grants.

Hilarious in that LOLSOB sort of way. One of my ex-bosses found out about a massive grant for which he and a bunch of colleagues spread around the country were perfect, about ten days before the due date, and all of them spent the next week doing almost nothing else. My boss probably spent 50 hours on it himself, I did 10-14, they had teleconferences and massive documents shooting back and forth and 20 pages each of bibliography, biographies of all key personnel, detailed budgets, and figure legends. Then there was the 30-some-odd page actual document, gone over with many fine-toothed combs by administrators at 5 different universities around the country.

And they didn't even make it past the first round, and all that work? Much too specific to that actual grant to be much good for anything else.

Damn. I'm kind of talking myself out of it.

LOLSOB

Exactly. "We just don't have the award YET!" Good times.

Damn. I'm kind of talking myself out of it.

Don't do that! Grant writing is applicable lots of places and dovetails with your current skill set. It's way more useful for you than some of the other options.

Seriously, though pre-award grants administration doesn't have much to do with grant writing-- the researchers do the actual writing part. It is budgets and getting them to the research review board. However, still useful.

Time to look at the various courses the Development Office offers and see what's worth taking.

All right.

CSS?

Sure!

Dreamweaver?

Okay!

Flash?

Definitely!

Java?

Absolutely!

XML?

Do it!

Pre-award grant administration?

That works too.

though pre-award grants administration doesn't have much to do with grant writing-- the researchers do the actual writing part

There are some universities - of which I am particularly jealous - whose grant staff WRITES the grant for the researchers after getting some boilerplate language together from the researcher.

Holy fuck. I wish this could happen for me.

After one of my aunts retired from her full time job she started getting volunteering for several organizations and that led to grant writing for them. Which led more grant writing and that became almost another full time job. She learned as she went and then ended "retiring" from that.

Smaller-scale grantwriting really is a whole different animal than big-institution work, but understanding the craziest possible process (big institution, going to say NIH) is good experience for the other.

You're not Google's customer. Google's advertisers are their customers. You're Google's product.

Bore repeating. And I have an initial and a pseudonymous name. So I should at least edit the initial. But, and this is the kicker, I can't just do that in Google+. The act of editing my name there edits it in all my google products. But it's been registered as L. as my gmail name for a long time, and I use that email address for people that I don't want to give a full name too. I think I may need to just back out of their full slate of products.

I can see that they're going for the whole hog here, and I don't really want on that train. I can see the benefit from my limited experience as an advertiser, but I really don't want to sell myself that way.