Lately, I've been writing a lot of letters to granting agencies and telling them why they should give me money, ahem, travel awards.
Here's a sample:
The meeting in Rome will allow me to present these novel results to an international group with a wide range of expertise, all pertaining directly or indirectly to my area of research. It will also give me an excellent opportunity at this critical time in my career to make contact with some of the foremost researchers in cardiovascular disease from around the world. These contacts will be pivotal in my future career decisions.
I could explain how in Italy "the boys and weather are hot, the food and wine are awesome and siteseeing is spectacular," but I don't think they'd be impressed. Jen thinks I need to put the word 'kickass' in there somewhere, like "Rome is so kickass" or "I'm so totally kickass." One thing is sure, slipping 'kickass' in the letter would make my application stand out from the rest! My supervisor may nix that idea... Although I should squeak it in there before he reads it tomorrow to see if I can make him laugh. I did that once before when I gave him an abstract to read.
I snuck this in at the end:
Conclusion: Sleep and socializing time has significantly decreased as a result of this study and is highly and positively correlated with the amount of data generated from our analyses. Hopefully we can eventually conclude something profound.
Then he didn't even read the conclusion! It's a bummer when you have to point out your joke to someone and THEN they laugh... Takes the punch out of it.
Anyways, I figure that probably the intellectual equivalent of kickass will do. Jen suggested 'exemplary.' Hey, that's one adjective I hadn't used yet. I think I should get Jen to help me write stuff more often, after all, she won a technical writing award for a paper that got published recently!!! That little grad-shark!
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3 comments:
Even with the award (for which, to this day, I swear there was a mistake!), I still suffer from what you and Rose have termed "Imposter Syndrome". But I figure, at least I'm in good company! Every day I feel like bowing down and saying "I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy!" a la Wayne's World. Maybe it's a grad student thing.
Yeah like after that speech at the banquet when the boss talked about how his current students are his best ever and he expects great things in our futures? Or, I can't even remember it all!!! Yeah, I cringed at that thinking, "What the? Is he talking about us? Not me... Can't be. Has he been drinking?"
Man, this 'blowing your own horn' thing blows though...
I knew you could do it! But I didn't want to invalidate the enormity of the task by saying, "you won't have a problem Rosie!" People did that to me during my candidacy exam. I wanted to tell them "but... but you don't understand how huge this is for me."
Congratulations!!! YOU DO KICK ASS CHICKIE!!!
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