Rolling the Dice for Grant Funding Pipelines

🎲 𝐑𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐆𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐅𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐏𝐢𝐩𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬 🎲

I've been wanting to do this video for a while now, and thanks to Maceon Knopke's lovely 3D printed dice, here it is!

This is also my 50th 🎂 Hacking Academia video 🎉🎉🎉 !!!

A lot of academic research career coaching I do revolves around basic concepts of probability and variance in an academic career: for awareness, and for how your strategy can be shaped to mitigate these challenges.

One of the key examples of this is funding pipelines: an integral part of most researchers' lives whereby they regularly apply for funding to do the research they want to do.

Rolling dice* is such a lovely way to visually capture some of the key concepts and considerations, as shown in this video: rolling a "1" is considered a successful grant outcome, and any other number is considered a rejection.

The key concepts illustrated in this video include:

🎲 the variation in outcome possible when you're putting in a single application at a time, perhaps on a yearly basis

🎲 the effect of improving repeated applications (seen in switching from a 6-sided die to a 4-sided die, representing increased odds of 25% up from 16.7%) - but still the lack of any guarantee that even a vastly improved application will be successful in any specific time frame

🎲 that for low acceptance rate schemes - those tough single digit acceptance rate, or even notorious alleged zero percent acceptance rate schemes (😡), it's basically a lottery where many highly qualified applicants will strike out. It took 31 attempts to roll a successful grant in a simulated scheme with 8.3% acceptance rate (this was an unusual but not impossible outcome, and has actual odds of happening 6.7% of the time - so 1 in 15 people would apply 30 times and not be successful 🤯

🎲 that, of course, having multiple applications in consideration at any time drastically increases your chances, and that having some diversity in those applications: diversity in whether fundamental or applied, whether large or small, and whether low chance or high chance of success, can help

This information can be presented in graphical, or textual form, but sometimes visual (with satisfying dice clinking sounds as well) can be the best way to illustrate concepts like this!

💻 YouTube link: https://lnkd.in/d99vY8By

* I will never not need to mentally check, is it "dice" or "die" for plural / singular

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