Deans' Weblog: Dalhousie Graduate Studies

Quality Mentoring: A Key to Success

Yesterday, NSERC released this year's PGS-M and PGS-D competition results. Departments of successful applicants have already been notified, but results otherwise remain confidential, until the Minister of Industry has made a formal announcement. That said, however, the release of the results to the Deans triggered some heavy number crunching on my part. Without going into details, I want to share a general observation, which corroborates conclusions drawn from recent tri-council scholarship competitions.

More than in previous years, the success of applications was highly clustered. Successful applications mostly came from programs, which stringently adhere to two principles: early, pro-active indentification of talented students and quality mentoring. For the remainder of this blog, let me dwell on the latter.

Effective mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students by faculty members is one of the most important keys to a successful graduate programs because of the one-on-one nature of most research-intensive programs. That said, one would have expected that academic administrators alike recognize that mentoring takes work, experience, patience, and time. Unfortunately, that’s not necessarily the case. To quote from Nature “Of all the activities that take place [in the lab], perhaps the least remarked upon and the least rewarded is that of the mentorship of young researchers." This is why in 2005 Nature launched its annual awards for outstanding scientific mentorship.

The roles of mentors constantly vary. Often simultaneously, mentors need to be:

• Disciplinary guides.
• Skills development consultants, honing

• Oral and written communication skills,
• Team-oriented/interdisciplinary skills,
• Leadership skills,
• Grantsmanship skills.

• Career consultants.

Quality mentoring greatly enhances graduate student success in many aspects. Graduate students who receive effective mentoring demonstrate greater:

• Productivity/Competitiveness: in research activity, conference presentations, pre-doctoral publications, instructional development, scholarship/grant writing, and awards.
• Academic success: in persisting in graduate school, taking a shorter time to earn a degree, and performing better in academic coursework.
• Professional success, with greater chances of securing tenure-track positions if seeking employment in academe or career advancement if seeking leadership positions in other educational settings or economic sectors.

In summary, good mentoring can make the difference between not only recruiting good students but also retaining the student and helping the student to be marketable upon graduation. With good mentoring, a student will be well prepared to enter his or her profession not only with the requisite disciplinary knowledge and skills but also with an understanding of the pathways to success and the self-reliance to embark upon them with confidence.

Becoming a mentor is like making a wise investment; it can be costly at first but the long-term returns are surprisingly large. Being a mentor can be a personally fulfilling experience, one in which the mentor benefits at least as much as the mentee. The rewards continue long after one's student becomes one's colleague, often for a lifetime.

When does quality mentoring start. As early as possible, but latest in the two senior undergraduate years. This not only helps in identifying students dedicated to research early, but also in setting them on the right path to a successful career.

Have a good weekend.

 

Dieter

Mentoring Graduate Students – The New Future of Graduate Education

"Graduate Students a Priority for the Incoming University of Calgary President" announced UToday on May 11, 2010. Speaking at the University of Calgary's annual graduate research conference on May 7, incoming president Dr. Elizabeth Cannon said positioning the university for the future is top of the agenda as she assumes her job in July and that graduate students and graduate education is a key part of that. She further told attendees that graduate students are “hugely valuable” for research-intensive universities and that the University of Calgary has a large responsibility to develop the needed programs and support for them. “The University of Calgary needs to be very disciplined to ensure graduate students get the training and skills to be successful while also engaging in classrooms to expose undergraduates to their knowledge and enthusiasm. ….. We have to look at ways that we can do things better, that we can position you better so that you can leave our institution feeling more confident, feeling better prepared, and have that capacity to be successful—whether you carry on to do academic work, community development or work in industry,” Dr. Cannon said.

On graduate student funding, an issue close to my heart, Dr. Cannon said “the University of Calgary needs to be more successful in the federal granting councils, encouraging faculty members to compete and be competitive in the search for highly sought-after research dollars that directly contribute to the number of graduate students that can be supported.”

“There’s a whole trickle-down effect of being competitive at the national level in the tri-council. To me, that is one area where we as an institution support and expect our faculty members to be both active and successful.”

If I could add one more point to Dr. Cannon’s passionate engagement with a wide array of graduate student issues, it would be the concept of graduate student mentoring, a concept that we are actively promoting at Dalhousie University and which has already been successfully adopted by some graduate departments.

In 19^th-century graduate education, the student-professor relationship looked a lot like the worst kind of apprenticeship: the prize of admission to the craft was to do the bidding of the master. Today, that model is as obsolete as writing a dissertation on a typewriter. The landscape of today’s graduate education is much different, and so is its population. The quantity of knowledge has exploded, the boundaries between disciplines have blurred, and advances in both the resources and methods available for study and research fuel both phenomena.

These factors have necessitated both a broader, more sophisticated notion of graduate student supervision, and a heightened recognition of its vital role in the preparation of the next generation’s intellectual leaders, both within and beyond the academy.

Some faculty limit their responsibilities of supervision to simply discharging their role as advisors. While advisors can certainly be mentors, and often are, effective mentoring requires playing a more expansive role in the development of a future colleague. The role of advisor usually is limited to guiding academic progress. The role of mentor is centered on a commitment to advancing the student’s career through an interpersonal engagement that facilitates sharing guidance, experience and expertise.

Effective mentoring of graduate students by faculty members is one of the most important keys to a successful graduate program because of the one-on-one nature of most graduate programs. That said, one would have expected that academic administrators alike recognize that mentoring takes work, experience, patience, and time. Unfortunately, that’s not necessarily the case. To quote from the introduction to the Nature awards for mentoring in science “Of all the activities that take place [in the lab], perhaps the least remarked upon and the least rewarded is that of the mentorship of young researchers. This is why in 2005 Nature launched its annual awards for outstanding scientific mentorship.”

According to the National Council of Graduate Schools and the National Institutes of Health, mentors are:

• Advisors, who have career experience and share their knowledge.
• Supporters, who give emotional and moral encouragement.
• Tutors, who provide specific feedback on performance.
• Supervisors, who monitor their student's academic and professional progress.
  
• Masters, who serve as employers to graduate student “apprentices.”
• Trainers, who teach professional responsibility.
  
• Sponsors, who are sources of information about opportunities and assist students in obtaining them.
• Role models, who exhibit the qualities and ethical values that academics should possess.

In other words, the roles of mentors constantly vary. Often simultaneously, mentors need to be:

• Disciplinary guides.
• Skills development consultants, honing

• Oral and written communication skills,
• Team-oriented/interdisciplinary skills,
• Leadership skills,
• Grantsmanship skills.

• Career consultants.

Quality mentoring greatly enhances graduate student success in many aspects. Graduate students who receive effective mentoring demonstrate greater:

• Productivity/Competitiveness: in research activity, conference presentations, pre-doctoral publications, instructional development, and scholarship/grant writing.
• Academic success: in persisting in graduate school, taking a shorter time to earn a degree, and performing better in academic coursework.
• Professional success, with greater chances of securing tenure-track positions if seeking employment in academe or career advancement if seeking leadership positions in other educational settings or economic sectors.

In summary, good mentoring can make the difference between not only recruiting good students but also retaining the student and helping the student to be marketable upon graduation. With good mentoring, a student will be well prepared to enter his or her profession not only with the requisite disciplinary knowledge and skills but also with an understanding of the pathways to success and the self-reliance to embark upon them with confidence.

Becoming a mentor is like making a wise investment; it can be costly at first but the long-term returns are surprisingly large. Being a mentor can be a personally fulfilling experience, one in which the mentor benefits at least as much as the mentee. The rewards continue long after one's student becomes one's colleague, often for a lifetime.

That’s it for today. I'm out of here.

Have a good weekend.

 

Dieter

Useful references to look at:

How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty. The Regents of the University of Michigan (2009).

How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Faculty Guide. The Graduate School. University of Washington.

Advisor, Teacher, Role Model, Friend: On Being a Mentor to Students in Science and Engineering. The National Academies Press (1997).

A Guide to Training and Mentoring in the Intramural Research Program at NIH.

Mentoring/Being Mentored. Arizona State University Graduate Studies.

Reference Letters Revisited – The Never-Ending Story

An effective reference letter could mean the difference between success and failure for a scholarship application to one of the provincial or federal tri-council agencies. A reference letter is used to introduce the applicant and to vouch for the candidate’s integrity, character, and abilities. The members of selection committees need to know as much as possible about an applicant to determine his or her ability to perform adequately. Letters of reference provide information from a teacher or research supervisor who has been personally involved with the candidate. This outside source provides a valuable record of the candidate's previous experience and can testify to his or her skills and abilities. An effective reference letter

• verifies experience,
• confirms competence,
• builds credibility, and
• bolsters confidence in the applicant.

Now, as sort of as a worst practice example, I’m reproducing a reference letter for a candidate in this year’s CIHR Master’s scholarship competition. “A gifted and motivated student. Very hard working and intelligent. Very focused on his/her research project with Dr. X using the Y model. Will eventually be a successful researcher.” No, I didn’t make this up. This actually was a sponsor’s assessment of a candidate for the CIHR master’s award. Ask yourself. Did this appraisal (written on a BlackBerry or iPhone in an airport terminal at the last minute???) meet any of the criteria listed above? Definitely not. The only thing it achieved was to reduce the chances of an otherwise good application of being funded.

Thus, yet again, my tips for students seeking reference letters are:

• Choose who will represent you wisely. No one person can represent you accurately in all areas. Find someone who knows your strengths in the areas you need to satisfy the requirements of a particular funding agency and/or selection board. In this context, it is also important that the person providing the reference letter has a good understanding of your academic history, interests, goals, and direction.
• Schedule a convenient time for you and your sponsor to meet. Review the requirements and expectations of the reference letter. This process helps the person who is writing the letter answer questions, clarify points that may need elaboration, and point out additional information that may be required. Make this process easy by providing all of the information needed so that you can obtain an accurate and positive recommendation.
  
• When you request a reference letter, communicate your needs in a straightforward way. Explain what you are applying for and ask if the person can provide you with a good recommendation. If someone exhibits any uneasiness about providing you with a strong recommendation, be polite, thank him/her for their time and then look elsewhere. Choose only someone who (1) can provide a well-written letter, (2) knows you well enough to be credible, (3) thinks highly of you and your abilities, (4) holds a respected position, and (5) is knowledgeable of and familiar with the selection criteria and their respective weights.
• Keep in mind that the sponsor is doing you a favor and has a busy schedule with other commitments. Make sure you allow enough time so that he or she can provide you with a well-written and effective letter.

Finally, a few words of advice for sponsors providing reference letters:

If you are asked to write a letter of reference, you will need to discuss this subject with the requester. Can you honestly write outstanding things about the person who has requested the letter and do you really have the time to do so? If not, you should bow out gracefully at the very beginning. On the other hand, if you feel you qualify, brainstorm with the requester so you can write what he or she wishes to be said, and be sensitive to his/her deadlines. Letters of recommendation may be written in a classic format that includes an introduction, body, and conclusion. There may also be specific requirements for certain letters that you may need to follow. In most cases, however, any well-organized format will be acceptable. Look at the following sample format.

Introduction:

• Introduce yourself as the sponsor. State your professional position, how you know the applicant, the length of your relationship, and any other pertinent information to build your credibility as a knowledgeable contributor.
• Provide an overview of your general impressions of the applicant.  

Body:

• Cover one exceptional quality of the applicant in each paragraph.
• Use specific examples to show how you observed each quality.
  
• Address qualities in order of importance.
• Keep the body of the letter to two or three strong paragraphs.

Conclusion:

• Confirm that the applicant would be a desirable recipient of an award, adding any other comments you feel appropriate.
• Encourage the reader to contact you for additional information or with any questions.

More specifics on how to request and write an effective reference letter can be found in my blogs from Nov. 21, 2008 and Nov. 7, 2009.

Over and out. Back to Carolyn.  I guess, Mike still needs some time to figure out more than where the paperclips are.

Dieter

  

Applying for Scholarships or Their Renewals: Best Practices

After 30+ years in academia, I thought I had seen it all. This belief, however, was challenged when I came across the first hand-written application for renewal of a Killam scholarship. As many of you are aware, we greatly simplified the Killam renewal process last year in that it now only requires the student, the supervisor and the graduate coordinator to fill out the two-page FGS progress report form. Well then, my (partially successful) attempts to decipher this particular application took me close to 60 minutes and I had to enlist help from other staff in FGS. Add 12 other applications like that to the picture and you may be able to understand, why I wasn’t a particularly happy camper once everything was said and done. Two other examples, one again from the Killam renewal process and one from the Sumner scholarship competition, stick in my mind. On one progress report form, the student stated that (s)he took 3 courses in the first year of funding and answered all the other questions with n/a (not applicable). The supervisor wrote a one liner “the student is engaged in various projects and makes excellent progress.” The graduate coordinator simply checked the box that (s)he read and agrees with the progress report. Does this look like a winner to you? In the other example, a hand-written application for a Sumner scholarship, the student listed 4 proceedings (?) to his/her credit without identifying the journal, volume number, page numbers and year of publication; in fact, it was unclear whether these were papers, abstracts or simply oral or poster presentations. It must have meant something to the graduate coordinator, who rated the applicant highly, but it surely meant nothing to the selection committee.

Now, after having given you some examples of pitfalls best to avoid when applying for a scholarship or its renewal, it may be helpful for future competitions to actually provide you (as well as your supervisors and graduate coordinators) with some best practice hints of what potentially enhances the competitiveness of an application.

Filling out the scholarship application or the renewal form is a fact of life when seeking scholarships or their renewal. Unfortunately, there is no generic form or format; each scholarship fund has its own methods and information needs. It is important to read the materials carefully and to understand what information is requested.

First and foremost, plan ahead of time and set yourself reasonable deadlines with clearly defined deliverables. Don’t put the application off to the last minute. Allow for enough time (1) to solicit good letters of reference, original transcripts (if required), meaningful assessments of your progress by your supervisor and graduate coordinator and (2) to get a second opinion on your application. This will alleviate the stress of last-minute cramming to meet the scholarship deadline.

The scholarship application form introduces you to the judges. You need to make that introduction as crisp and business-like as possible.

Make copies of the application form so that you can create a working draft. Use that draft to complete the final application form.

Type the application form if at all possible. Don’t use fancy fonts; stick with standard business fonts like Times New Roman or Arial. Legibility and neatness are extremely important. Your application runs the risk to be eliminated if it cannot be easily read. Also stick with reasonable font sizes. Granted, Times New Roman or Arial size 8 allows you to put more information into a limited space. However, you have to weigh this against the fact that not every reviewer will buy a magnifying glass or stronger readers in order to be able to assess your application. National granting agencies like CIHR nowadays do not even sent grant applications for review, if they’re not printed using standard business fonts size 12.

Answer every question. If you don’t believe that a question applies to you, don’t leave it blank – it could be judged incomplete. Don’t mark the question N/A. The reviewers may have a different point of view on its applicability and can disqualify you for failing to complete the form. Instead, answer the question if you can. If the question is truly not applicable, write a sentence that describes your situation.

Check, check and re-check for typos, omissions and errors. Enlist help in this review. It is very hard to proof read your own material. Inevitably, your mind’s eye reads what you thought you wrote, not what actually made it onto the page. A fresh pair of eyes will catch what you missed and find the spelling problems. If there is one thing I learned from dealing with funding agencies, it is that simple errors will remove you from the competition much more quickly than listing too few club activities. Even if you are not class valedictorian or community volunteer of the year, you can still be successful by being sure you spelled the name of the scholarship fund correctly and by attending to all of the other minor details that will make your application perfectly correct and therefore worthy of consideration.

Avoid technical jargon that only a Nobel laureate in your area of research is able to comprehend. Chances are that this Nobel laureate may not be the one assessing your application. Use language that well-rounded PhDs in the sciences are able to understand. In this context it is often helpful to have your application read by someone in a different area of research than your own. If, after carefully reading your application, this person is still clueless of what you propose to do and why it is important, you may have a problem.

Place the requested documents in the package in the order that they are requested. This consistency makes it easier for reviewers to locate information. It’s also simpler for you to check the documents against the list of requirements. Also make sure your name appears on all pages of the application. Pieces of your application may get lost unless they are clearly identified.

Do not add documents that have not been requested. You are better served by focusing on making your application shine, using the structure requested by the funding agency.

Make a complete copy of the application before you send it. Don’t skip the transcript or the financial aid statement because you know those are included; it is always important to have a complete record of everything you send to the funding agency in exactly the form you expect it to be received by the funding agency.

Use an envelope that will hold your application without folding it. As a matter of presentation, the application will look better without creases. When sending the application, use delivery services that allow you to track the package. In this way you will have proof that the application was received by the organization. If you do not receive proof of receipt within the appropriate length of time, follow up. You won’t have a chance at a scholarship or its renewal if the application never makes it to the in-box.

The final step is to make sure that you keep your scholarship in succeeding years. Thus, be sure you understand whether or not your scholarship is renewable. Most scholarships can be renewed on a yearly basis. However, the renewal mostly is not automatic. You may need to apply again, and this time around you will have to actually demonstrate/document progress rather than potential.

The bottom line is that the scholarship application or the scholarship renewal is a paper model of you. Make sure your application is professional and compelling. Also always remember that, when applying for a scholarship or scholarship renewal, the powers that be want to know three things: why is it important to you, why it is right for you and why you are right for it. Your application should be built around this final message.

Have a good weekend.


Dieter

How hard can it be to give money away?

In every job there are chores.  You know, things that seem like they take hours when they only take minutes.  For most professors, marking exams and essays falls into this category. 

For academic administrators like the Grad Studies team here at Dalhousie, one of the monthly chores is the bursary meeting.  We administer a small amount of money that acts as an emergency backstop for students if they have financial problem as a result of an extraordinary event.  For example, someone slips on the winter ice and as a result needs emergency dental work.  That sort of thing.  The bursary fund isn't there for expenses a student could and should have anticipated, like textbooks, tuition, groceries or the tab at the Grad House. It's for emergencies, and failing to plan for the predictable doesn't count as an emergency. 

Students apply for the money using a form (of course), and it requires them to disclose their current financial situation since we don't want to give the money to people who don't really need it.  So once a month a select group of us get to wade through between 12 and 20 applications with the associated financial disclosures, trying to assess eligibility and appropriateness. 

Looking at this subset of the student population is decidedly disturbing.  Naturally these people are in financial trouble; otherwise they wouldn't be applying for the bursary. But the depth of their troubles is sometime truly astonishing.  One of the recent applicants reported a current student debt of $80,000 while he is trying to get through a Master's degree.

Assuming the student is telling the truth, this application raises all kinds of questions among those of us who are pathologically debt-averse.  First, why would a student go into this level of debt for a program where the graduates do not always get employment in a field related to their studies, or where the entry level salaries in the profession are $45K?  What kind of economic analysis has the student undertaken in coming to the conclusion to invest this amount of money in this way? Who would loan him this kind of money?

As a person whose PhD cost him something in the order of $250K (direct and indirect), I understand very well that the arguments for going to university are not just economic ones. But still....

Through the bursary application process, we really want to find the students who need this money and who qualify.  We want to give it away.  But the vast majority of applicants are in financial trouble because they did not think about sequels and natural consequences to choices. That's a problem for all of us in society, not just the bursary committee.

Sunny

Academic Chores - Committee Work

The job of an academic in this institution has three parts to it: teaching (40%), research (40%), and service (40%). Yes, I know this doesn't add up to 100%; that's because it's impossible to limit the service part of the job to just 20%, the theoretical limit. The word "service" in this context usually means serving on some of the innumerable committees which govern and administer the institution.  I had three notable such committee meetings this week. 

The first meeting was the Ad Hoc Committee to examine Senate Governance practices, practices which are most notably effected through the committees of Senate. In a sense, this is a committee on committees. This is not the first such committee on committees I have seen in my relatively brief tenure at the university.  The irony is not lost on anyone, especially the people serving on the committee itself.

The second meeting was the joint session of the Senate Discipline Committee and the Academic Integrity Officers (AIOs) of the university, and I get to attend since I am the AIO for the Faculty of Graduate Studies.  There were 29 people in the room. The urge to calculate the cost of the meeting was almost overwhelming, but I resisted. It doesn't matter anyway, given how important academic integrity is to the mission of the organization.

Either one of these events provided ample material for this blog.  But it was the third one I want to reflect on today.  The Faculty of Graduate Studies organizes a small group to make important selections from among people nominated for service award, and the Governor General's medal for masters and PhD research in two categories: 1) natural sciences / engineering, and 2) humanities / social scientists. Adjudicating the service awards is a matter of reading the nomination letters and making a judgment. This in itself is a non-trivial matter.

Adjudicating the academic awards is something else again.  We are given nomination letters, external examiners reports, candidate CVs, and their complete thesis. The volume of material is prodigious and the quality of the individual submissions is very high. That's how they get nominated, of course. It is NOT an easy task. One of the members of the panel was from science (Martin Gibling), one was from humanities / social sciences (Sarah Cohen), and me (you are hereby invited to offer a classification rubric for me). Each of us in our own way comes to terms with the plethora of material, and then we meet to discuss our findings.

It was astonishing to me how much effort the panelists put into this task. Their care and due diligence was a wonder.  They each expressed  concerns about their own possible biases and demonstrable lack of expertise in specific areas and how that might affect fairness.  They were open to the assessments and judgments of others. And what they were able to discuss about the content of these very diverse topics was remarkable. Perhaps most surprising of all, of the five decisions we had to make, four of them were virtually unanimous.

This has happened to me a couple of times before in similar circumstances, where a disparate community of people from widely varying backgrounds independently assess proposals or research outcomes, and they come to a very clear consensus notwithstanding their obvious differences. I don't know how this happens.

I was grateful to have people like Martin and Sarah in the room. The combination of their intelligent, insightful, mature, and witty contribution and the extraordinarily high level of student achievement  made this committee meeting the highlight of the week.  After the meeting it occurred to me that someone actually paid me for that experience.

Amazing.

Sunny

Best Dissertation

The Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools (NAGS) probably didn't think very hard about the acronym their organization would generate.  I suppose it is better than the Southwestern Association of Graduate Schools. In any event, Dalhousie University is a member of the organization, and as such we get to make our contribution too. Over the last month, we have had the job of helping determine the winner of the "best dissertation" award.

The awards are cycled through a set of disciplines over a four year period in the following categories:

• Social Sciences & Education (this year's category)
• Arts & Humanities (2009)
• Agricultural, Biological & Health Sciences (2010)
• Physical Sciences, Mathematics, & Engineering (2011)

As one of the referees, I am grateful the selection was limited to social sciences and education, an area where I might be expected to have some general level of familiarity. They will not be calling me to adjudicate the years for sciences, math and engineering, that is for sure.

Last month, the post office dutifully delivered a package containing six CD-ROMS. On each of these was burned the results of years and years of work, suffering, commitment (i.e., a dissertation), along with the c.v. of the graduate and a number of letters of recommendation. 

You can imagine the challenge.  Six full dissertations in six radically different areas (1. ESL for the education of the children of migrant farm workers, 2. linguistic discourse comprehension, 3. unemployment and trade, 4. social and environmental accounting, 5. distance education of parents with autistic children, and 6. domestic violence in Chile during dictatorship and during democracy).

Six dissertations using six different research methods.  Survey.  Synthetic analysis with retrospective data. Classical experiment. Multiple case study.  Ethnography and close analysis. Combination.

I learned a huge amount this week while working through the process. One of the papers gave me some very excellent improvements to some thinking I have been doing in an area of personal research interest.  These dissertations also gave me a very clear idea of the standards other universities have for document preparation and writing style.  And one last lesson - it is crystal clear to me that Dalhousie students produce work that is competitive with the very best.

Not that there was any doubt.

Sunny

Watch out fish!

Pretty exciting news this week of the 35 million dollar CFI grant and 10 million dollars from NSERC for the marine life tracking system here at Dal.  What an incredible concept! Put  tags on fish and marine mammals and set up reader curtains to track were they go over a huge area of the ocean.   It would seem it might be possible to track a particular fish or turtle on a web site soon. I would, of course, like them to have a web cam as well!

I am spending next week in Ottawa at the NSERC Discovery Grant committee meetings. This process is similar to the NSERC scholarship selection meetings but for faculty members. The process is pretty straightforward; several people read the proposal and cv and try to rate the proposal on the grounds of quality of the researcher, HQP (contribution to training of Masters and PhD students), and the quality of the proposal. As you might imagine, however, the actual determinations are not that straightforward. How do you compare X publications in one area with Y in another? How about researchers who publish a few journal articles vs some who publish a whole whack of conference papers? Each discipline has its subtle sub-cultures and the grant pot gets proportionately smaller as more researchers engage. Luckily, new applicants have a special fund so they are only competing amongst themselves and it is generally the more senior researchers, at least in my area, that take the fund reductions for the most part.

The Canadian system for grants in Science and Engineering is quite different from the American system and, indeed, most other countries. Essentially, many individual scientists are funded a modest amount as a base for their research. They can, at the same time, apply for larger and team grants, of course, but this money will support a few students and conference travel for a 3 to 5 year period. Many researchers use this money to get larger projects up and going. The US system is based on what I call the "star" system. A few people get a lot of money and the rest get none. Good if you are the "star"!  Each approach has its good points but I really like the bottom up approach as it does not channel proposals to the current hot topic but allows the incubation of fledgling ideas that may grow into the next generation of hot topics.

To bring this back to watching my fish move about the Atlantic, how did that first researcher fund those tests with tags that may not have  worked so well, get to conferences to confer with colleagues, support some grad students, etc so that now they are ready to take on the big league?  I bet they had regular NSERC grants that they used to  do the research that led to much bigger grants and now the CFI.

So, the good news is that the Canadian  system in Science, at least, works well. The not so good news- graduation does not mean the end of grant proposal writing!

Enjoy the break week and think of me up in Ottawa with boxes of proposals, hour after hour!

Carolyn