My first Grant..yayyy

Email: Congrats, you have won our grant and we are glad to support  your research !

Oh yes, my first grant as a PI. This is a teeny-tinnny grant but still I am the PI on this grant. No co-PI's no nothing. All me ! yayyyyyyy

M happy and singing and dancing. I like the small victories in life.

Forced Service ?

I got an email message from a senior administration person that he will like to recommend me for a certain service. Then he went on to ask if I will like to do so.

I did not respond to him for some time since I wanted to know what the service is about and how much time will it take.

Today I got an email that I have been assigned the service, which I did not agreed to till now. Needless to say I am pissed.

Is this normal?

Are you part of the Lab/Group or is it the other way around?

I have been thinking about putting up my web-presence about the awesome (in the future) lab/group that I am trying to establish. All the web surfing that I have been doing it seems that PI's/directors/group-leaders (whatever you choose to call your self) seems to be operating on one of the two scenairo's:

1) they have their personal profiles as the main page and a group/lab seems to be part of their profile e.g. they will have tab on their page such as "people" which will have the students/postdoc's listed and the PI may or may not choose to list them selves as "people"
2) they have a lab page as the main go-to page and choose to list them selves on the "people's" tab.

The first option seems to be that the "lab/group" is part of the PI and the second option seems to be that the PI is part of the lab/group.

For me the first option is more convenient since I already have a personal webpage and the only addition to it would be my affiliation and a "peoples" tab. On the other had I am not entirely comfortable with it. For the second option I will have to revamp my whole web presence which will need time and effort.

Which kind of style did you choose for your lab/group page and why?

Learn to say NO

Yes, today I dropped the first "NO" on a senior faculty member. Since the time I have started working as a TT faculty I have been pulled at various directions by various faculty members. Some of these directions I want to be pulled at because it is essential for me to set up here and get the ground going. But other kinds of requests or possible collaborations are just too much stress on my time.

I just politely told said a No to a possible collaboration. Although it would have been a fun thing to do it was mostly teaching related and I do not see it enhancing my career forward as of now.

Now I see what all other new TT's have been complaining about and advising how to say No's to multiple people. This advice is right on the money. Otherwise you might get pulled in too many directions to handle.

So my first advice as a new TT faculty: Learn to say NO (but in a nice way so that you don't offend people who are ultimately going to determine your tenure :D)

Need for speed

With all the proposal deadlines I have been wondering how fast can be write up a successful grant proposal from scratch provided that one has the idea and the required preliminary data to write such a grant.

So the blogosphere: What is your minimum number of days needed to write up a successful grant proposal?