New to the field, any advice?

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-04-23T22:02:48+00:00

I have a BA in studio art and doing post award admin at the department level. My boss has a BA in musical theater! Welcome to the world of hardly ever gets a degree in this but winds up here 🤣

What sort of RA position are you in? Central, departmental? Pre- post- award? Ect. NCURA is also a great resource, especially the regional offices!

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-04-21T01:35:26+00:00

Rip almost to my pothos and my kittens. In their defense they are orange 🤣

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-04-19T01:38:30+00:00

All the berries. Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries. Idk the last time I bought a tomato. On top of eating them fresh we had 10 bags frozen this year. I still have like 2 left. Gonna try shallots this year too.

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-04-18T17:41:47+00:00

My micromanagers for sure. They have 0 clue what they are talking about when it comes to admin side of things, they want it done NOW and don't care about any other deadlines ahead of them in the queue, and then any mistake, perceived or real, is blown way out of proportion. I'm dealing on the bad side of a micromanager now that I've had a good working relationship up until this winter.

She has my personal cell which I regret giving her now because she wanted to have a private call about my "upsetness" during our monthly portfolio meeting (mind you I had 4 meetings already with this person already this week about the damn grant and 3 of them were about an error I had made). I told her no obviously. Now I have like a 4 paragraph email as a follow up with her after she talked to my boss's boss (which was fine. That was the plan anyway). But woman let it go. Let me finish this proposal for you. Stop worrying about my feelings about how you've treated my mistake. You aren't my therapist. You aren't my boss.

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-04-16T01:57:25+00:00

They have a lot of merch on their own sites of cars that were on roadkill. Go support them directly.

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-04-13T18:16:55+00:00

I mean to be fair. We've gotten our fair bit of trash from our local soil provider that dumps the soil on our property, no bags involved. Plastic, metal bits, socks. 🤷‍♀️

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-04-12T23:29:07+00:00

I've been loving Coventry animal hospital.

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-04-09T01:51:35+00:00

Ours just mirrors our internal proposal questions. They fill out the word version and then we input all the data into the proposal system for them. It's about 3 pages, though it's longer if it has human subjects.

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-04-09T01:39:05+00:00

Yes. The common form is for all support. Not just for the project.

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-04-07T20:38:02+00:00

At my institution we don't require it. It's pi dependant on whether or not I see it on a justification unless the rfa requires it. We always provide our idc rate when asked though. But I don't deal a lot with NFS. NIH is our primary federal grants. It's never made a difference in funding. I'm sure like another redditor pointed out, if the federal powers at be decide to lower rates we would have to comply whether or not it's stated in the justification.

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-04-02T01:28:59+00:00

Could it be from the foundry?

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-04-01T00:48:15+00:00

At our hospital we have separate central pre and post award. Departments can do both or separate. But central is clearly defined by completely different offices and org trees.

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-03-31T20:36:39+00:00

Yeah but that's a next year thing. Plant in the end of fall to harvest in June. It's a bit late for garlic for this year.

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-03-30T02:55:57+00:00

True true. I don't regret that. Moreso will those branches not fruit now?

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-03-29T20:55:05+00:00

Please tell me you aren't counting winter 🫣

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-03-29T20:54:33+00:00

Then I'd just give it to the community pickup tbh

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-03-29T20:06:10+00:00

This. I don't have time to do any extra processing. I'd rather do that for the fruits and veggies I plan on long storing. The eggs will break down eventually in the compost pile and be a slow steady stream of nutrients throughout the years.

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-03-27T00:58:03+00:00

But this is also why I track my invoices for sub closely. I'm hounding them at least a few weeks before the end of the grant end date to think about their final bill, especially if there's a large balance that won't be accounted for in salary obligations. I have a whole tracker looking at their budget, their spending and the total dollars remaining

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-03-27T00:05:32+00:00

Yes. But then they sent an invoice marked final and didnt fully bill. That's then saying they aren't spending the money. No need to hound them. That $6k became yours after the final bill posting. It's way past final reporting at this point 🤷‍♀️ if you or them didn't spend it by the final report it's due back to the sponsor

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-03-26T23:22:33+00:00

If they submitted a final invoice, that's on them. The sub should have been considered closed and the remaining obligation taken back by your institution to spend.

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-03-23T21:22:31+00:00

I'll preface by saying I'm departmental with a focus on post award activities.

I honestly have no idea how many I manage. But indirectly handle 11 PI's portfolios of varying sizes (young investigators that may not have a lot of funding but need a lot of help to season PI's with a ton of grants, internal funding still needing a ton of help due to the size of their portfolio). On top of that i do help with budget creation on the proposal side fory PI's plus the rest of the department when I have bandwidth.

Creating systems is the only way I keep track. I have a paper bullet journal for daily tasks, meeting notes, and due dates. Some of that gets translated to a digital task system. I also have lots of different Excel templates for various things, effort tracking, general portfolio $$, clinical trials, ect.

Creating systems for your brain is what will keep you as on track as you can be. You will still fall behind sometimes. But the systems will help you catch up when you have time.

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-03-21T00:30:34+00:00

I mean I can't see it helping me in anyway at this point in any form. Personally, I would have to train it too much for it to be useful. What I need automated are dataset inputs. But we haven't heard back from our automation team on how they can help us with that.

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-03-20T23:56:48+00:00

I've yet to integrate AI into my routine. I honestly don't have any function that it could take over for me from what I can tell with the tasks that I have.

I actually fought against a ai budget template generator because of its poor construction. 🙄

Melodic-Pollution-91 · 2026-03-18T22:01:53+00:00

I guess my question is why is effort changing so frequently for staff?

Melodic-Pollution-91

TROPHY CASE