Oooh and Aaah.

 nom nom nom

So, this is what accomplishment looks like to me. This is External Funding. It is the single most impressive thing on my vita, besides the PhD itself. Maybe more impressive than that, to others.

Last Spring we submitted a proposal for this grant, as part of a 10-university (more or less) consortium. On my part, this involved a few crazy days and nights writing and rewriting a proposal, meeting and re-meeting with the two members of my research team (an ethnographer too busy to be in charge of our 3 projects and criminal justice professor too smart), and smashing our 3 barely-related proposals into an unnatural research beast condemned to walk the earth… whatever. Then we had to do a budget, which involved me wildly guessing at what it would cost to do a 6-year research project. I’m sure my budget will be ignored during this final budgeting phase which is, according to one person, “a group of universities gathering like coyotes to fight over the scraps of meat on a skeleton”.

In the past year we’ve invested many thousands of dollars in travel and faculty time in this thing. Maybe tens of thousands. And we got it! Sort of. There’s slightly more money, but we have to share it with the UTEP consortium. Grr.

In the academic research world,  external funding is food. And publications are sex¹. Me, I’m getting my first good academic meal… ever (I’ve subsisted on hors d’oeuvres until now). And sex² … well… let’s say I’m like the nerd who can’t figure out why his come-on lines about the differences between Unix and Linux always result in a lonely walk back to his nerdpad.

But the food is pretty great. Now to figure out how to eat it, and if I wanted it in the first place ;)

1. You have to tell interviewers how much sex you’ve had, if you want a job [↩]
2. You realize this is all in the metaphor of publications = sex, and that I would never publicly discuss my own sex life in this level of detail… except to say that it’s frickin’ great [↩]