Danielle Blog

we have reported for the school year

Hello!

As the title indicates, I have officially reported back to school (Tuesday, Aug 17th). This means that I basically arrived at 8:30 just prior to the President’s welcome for new faculty and staff by more or less skipping the breakfast. And walked out to my car at something like 7:15.

Ah yes. It begins.

People who have been at this school for years kept trying to console any of us new folk with comments about how they know sitting in orientation meetings all day is really awful. But I guess I’m a total goof and/or alien, because I actually like this kind of stuff. After two years of teaching where I felt like I didn’t know as much as I would’ve liked about a) what had been going on and/or any new initiatives at school and b) where to go when certain problems arose, it was a relief to get to meet those people and ask my questions. I really hope that the other people in my orientation “class” don’t think of me as “that woman who always asked questions.” But honestly, I have found some of this info to be extremely helpful, and now was my chance to get it more easily than spending precious time cruising the website.

Other than that, my exciting news is that on Thursday of last week, I met with my department chair and the associate provost – who used to be the chem dept chair – to go over what I had prepared for talking to our Development office (i.e. fundraising) for my research needs. The grand total is just over $80,000, which was rather daunting until I heard that in chemistry, they need a certain piece of equipment that might cost them $200,000. With that in mind, my total didn’t seem quite so outrageous to either of them.
Anyway, the dept chair and the associate provost were very helpful and gave me places to tweak my cover letter/case statement. That also gave me places where I needed to change my powerpoint presentation before I met with Development on Monday of this week.

Monday, I met with the director of Development and she is SUPER excited about my research. She asked lots of questions and became really passionate about the topic. yay! She was also REALLY excited at all of the material I was providing to them.

I was under the impression that Development was mainly going to ask private donors for the funds for my project. So, I’d tailored a lot of the information that way. However, after hearing about my needs, she decided that they would just go ahead and contract out for a grant to be written. The school cannot afford a full-time grant writer, so this is the option that makes the most sense. During my job offer negotiations, the school had talked about contracting out with a grant writing agency to a) find sources of funding that would apply to my research and b) help write a grant. I hadn’t realized it was such a strong commitment, on their part, to do this, because it wasn’t really in my written offer. However, evidently our oral discussion was more solid than I’d realized; which is also really fantastic. There is pretty much no way that I could write a grant on my own during the school year for that kind of money; so this is key to getting my lab started.

Oh and as an aside, I am evidently “known” now as being a “tough negotiator.” Which is rather funny to me, since I never viewed myself that way. I guess all of those conversations with HB about his work projects and such, not to mention the support of some of you who talked to me outside of the blogosphere, had more of an influence than I’d realized!

She emailed the grant writing agency my documents (they are based in DC), and talked to them on the phone yesterday. Yesterday afternoon, I got an email that a particular grant-writer has been assigned to my work; this was very quick work on their part! I am supposed to hear about their ideas for funding agencies on Sept 3rd – which is really fast!

I know that this is going to add to my work load immensely this year. But when getting a lab up and running, it is sort of now or never.

I’m super psyched about this! And it totally makes up for the long hours. So, there you have it, the latest update on my work life.