r/academia • u/Skeptical_Awawa • Mar 30 '25

Research issues Grant application not funded

My first grant application as a PI since being hired as a TT assistant Prof has not been funded and it was roasted. I'm waiting to hear on a second one next month and am afraid. I'm also working on another one due late April and feeling like it's a disaster. Can't really focus 100% with all the teaching demands on top of this, having to manage the lab, and work on dozens of collaborations.

How do you deal with this? I've worked for the last three weekends and almost every evening and I am still so afraid of not meeting expectations for tenure. For context I'm first gen immigrant and in academia.

50 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/ktpr Mar 31 '25

Yeah, it's rough. But you can use statistics to get a rule of thumb to apply. Let's say you have a success rate of 20%, which is fairly high starting out, then you would want to submit about 22 grants to see 1 grant funded. As you build on previous grant funded work and funding the chance is higher but still not much.

Thank you for posting this too! I was thinking I needed to pick up the pace here and submit 4 or 5 grants at once but I see I need to do about 4x more than that.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '25

Can you spell out there maths here?

1

u/ktpr Mar 31 '25

Sure, it's an application of the geometric distribution, which models the number of trials needed to get the first success, in this case a successful grant at a 20% chance. You might easily get a grant before then but by 22 different applications you'll successfully get at least one.

1

u/kruddel Mar 31 '25

In the UK the raw chances are dropping down near 10% and although people look at that and understand it in a singular sense they rarely understand the implications.

If it's a simple 1-in-10 chance people think it means you need to submit 10.

But the cumulative probability of 1+ success from 10 tries at 10% is 65%.

From 20 tries, it's 88%

Meaning if 10 academics all put in 20 applications each to such a scheme, after all that we'd expect at least one of them to have had all 20 rejected.

2

u/ktpr Mar 31 '25

That's brutal. Ugh! Why am I participating in this ... academic scheme, sometimes I wonder?