 and at least a little bit at NASA as well since those are the ones we know that people are really excited about. We also want to think about strategies for highlighting and integrating these kind of broader impacts with scientific merit so we as postdocs are generally pretty good about doing things and talking about the science. A lot of the time it can be really challenging to meaningfully integrate those broader impacts into that and that's a major focus area for NSF in particular but also for a lot of other funding agencies so we really want to make sure that we can focus in on that. We also want to kind of go back to the original genesis of this idea and think about strategies for developing these successful convergent science grants and since we're kind of social scientists a lot of the convergent science work that goes on in atmospheric sciences is about integrating social and physical sciences we're going to focus on that but we're aware that convergent science goes beyond just integrating social and physical sciences so we're going to make sure that we also have an opportunity to talk about the convergence of multiple physical sciences or multiple social so moving on the last fun stuff the stuff that the series probably can't do and this is a big list of things that's really just things that were probably just not resourced to be able to do efficiently or really really well as a group together so these are things like helping with prioritization of the time that you spend searching for funding writing grants and conducting research so prioritizing that that's just going to be different for every postdoc and it's depend on your supervisor situation a number of other things help with searching for funding help with describing like specific scientific merit as your kind of particular area and grant or help with persuasive or technical writing skills these are things where there are resources in other areas that we think are really really good for that and they're also generally really specific to your particular project so we're hopeful that we can point out some resources as we go through for ways of getting at those things that kind of might be useful for you move forward but it's not something we're going to spend a lot of time on in our sessions. Similarly thinking about walking just an individual postdoc group the entire process we start to finish here is exactly how we put all these things together then you do this then you do that then you do this again that's going to be different for different funding agencies for different kinds of calls for different kinds of science and so we're not going to be able to kind of dedicate the time it would take to make sure that we cover every special situation. Similarly we're not going to be able to implement co-working groups for feedback on grant proposals that are kind of in progress even though we would love to it's probably not something that we have the resources to do and I really want to emphasize this again this doesn't mean that we don't think that these things are important it's just that we don't have the capacity to do all these things well as a group and so as a result of that we would highly encourage you guys to work together with interest to peers so other people who are here on this call or also with kind of more senior scientists so work with your supervisors work with other people who are interested in some of the similar things here talk about this stuff develop these skills so if it's disappointing that we're not able to focus on these things please please work together to kind of make sure that you can get the skills that you need moving forward and if you're really excited about one of these things that we probably can't do I guarantee you there's like five other people on the call who are also really excited about that so definitely talk about it as we move forward. So I'm going to finish up just by jumping through the schedule really really fast like I said before we're going to have six sessions that we're proposing this is the first one and generally speaking they're going to take place on Thursday mornings during this time slot so this is the time slot that we're going to use moving forward this is the time that is at the same time as our research reviews time so as much as we would have liked to not put everything on a Thursday morning it's so impossible to find a really really good time for everybody and this is the time that most of us have satisfied anyway for research reviews things and so having the opportunities to jump in here on off weeks was too good to miss so we're going to be coming in on Thursday mornings it's going to be generally speaking every two to three weeks up until the middle of November we're going to start here with the overview session and then we're going to get into some really interesting kind of special situations so on the 6th of October we're going to be thinking about granting organizations procedures and policies so I believe we are focusing on NSF and NOAA for that we're trying to get together some NASA resources as well so that we'll have the opportunities to look at that moving forward our third session towards the end of October is going to be focusing specifically on NCAR and UCT policies and protocols and then when we get into the beginning of November we're going to be thinking about project logistics so this is going to be thinking about kind of this big process that we've got going on with all of these things but also digging into those specific sections that we were talking about before that are often neglected outside of the realm of our experience and then later on in November we're going to focus down on research relevance and broader impact so thinking about translating some of the science that we're doing into broader impacts that can affect people and other kind of important situations and then we're going to take a big long break for the holidays and we're hoping sometime in early January to come back and really focus in on convergent so again we're going to be thinking a lot about integrating NSF science and social science but also kind of digging into some other areas so definitely check your emails for invites to the upcoming sessions you're going to get a new one for each one and it should just pop up in your calendar slot as well but if any of you have questions about those please feel free to reach out to us and we can go for it and now I think we're going to be jumping into our speakers I'm not entirely sure who's up first but I think you'll recognize your slides when you see them so thanks guys for coming in and remember if you have questions definitely jump on here if anything that I said doesn't make sense and you have questions about what that looks like if you have excitement about stuff that you want to really look should it be cover moving forward definitely highlight those in a flight of question in the q&a session and then we'll make sure to be at the end have a chance to go through this. I'll go ahead and jump in here Hugh it looks like I am the first one up so good morning everybody for those of you who don't know me I'm Scott Landl from the ASP Science Advisor I've been in this position for a little less than a year but I have been at NCAR for going on 26 years now so in that time I've had the opportunity to work on a wide variety of all sorts of different grants and proposals I've written proposals to NSF I've written proposals to NAS I've written proposals to NOAA the FAA private industry I've been really kind of all over the board in terms of the different proposals and stuff that I've worked on so Hugh Mariana and Suda came to me and asked if I could give an overview of some of the stuff that goes into the proposals things that I've worked on and that the components that you see listed here are really components that go into primarily an NSF type of proposal and I as we go through these and I'm going to keep this somewhat high level we'll get into a lot of these details later and some of the other future sessions as Hugh was mentioning but I want to at least give you kind of a little bit of a taste and idea of the types of things that you're going to have to consider when you sit down and you want to actually do some type of an in-depth proposal to NSF and I understand looking at these different things it looks a little bit daunting I'll use that word since I know a lot of you have already used that here at the beginning but I do want to say when it really comes down to it and you really look at proposals and stuff that people put out it's not a whole lot different than looking at some sort of a research paper or publication that you would put out there was a flow to them they have a background section and abstracts of sorts and then instead of getting into like a methods and a results type of thing that's really where you transition over to actually talking about what it is that you want to propose and what it is that you would expect to find with the research that you are actually proposing so I will walk through some of these I'll give you a little bit more detail on some of them some of them are fairly self-explanatory so I'm not really going to hit on them again but as far as the components the project summary you could almost consider that to be your abstract of sorts if you were writing a publication and then you get into the main body of it the project description sorry go back for just a second you I'm just going to touch on these real quick now the project description also known as the statement of work those terms get used interchangeably depending on the type of proposal that you're using references just like you would see in an actual publication you're definitely going to have references that are going to go along with your proposal a biographical sketch the budget any type of proposal that you do is going to have a budget that's that's that's a given current pending support facilities data management plans data management plan is really something that's becoming more and more important especially when you're talking about NSF or NASA or NOAA because they want to know how you're going to manage that data and how you're going to make it accessible to everybody once you've had your chance to do your data analysis and then supplementary documents so let's dive into a few of these here in a little bit more detail you can go to the next slide now thank you so the project summary and again this is kind of an NSF emphasis and as we're going through these I'm also going to give you an idea of which ones may or may not also show up in different types of proposals some of it is going to be dependent on funding level who you're who you're sending it out to private industry versus government versus other things but almost everybody is going to want some sort of a project summary explaining what it is that you want to do so as I mentioned that you could view this as an abstract when you're writing these generally they're one page maximum and they really highlight your primary objectives what is it that you are actually proposing that you want to do and usually within that again with this NSF emphasis they want you to highlight what the intellectual merit is so what is your proposed research addressing why is this important and if you're doing this research you're obviously doing it for a reason you should have somewhat of an idea of what the expected outcome is it doesn't mean that's what the outcome is going to be as all of us know you can do this research and find something that is completely different than what you were expecting but at least have an idea of what you expect to get out of this in terms of broader impacts you want to discuss partnerships outreach opportunities highlight student involvement or student opportunities particularly when you're talking about undergraduate or graduate students that may be working with you or in some sort of a collaborative sense and you don't necessarily even have to have those people identified but the the the idea is to at least give some thought to who you would like to see getting involved with this project and the knowledge and stuff that you can pass on the excitement that you can instill in other people so that they want to continue pursuing this as they grow in their career that that's kind of the idea behind that particular section next slide here the project description or this the statement of work and oftentimes you'll see statement of work abbreviated as SOW and you may see that some later coming up in some additional slides I just want to call out what that is it is really just a description of what it is this is kind of the bulk of your proposal this is where you are going to talk about what it is that you want to do in terms of NSF generally they're kept to 15 pages or less which does not include the references and 15 pages may seem like a lot but when you consider that you're probably going to have figures in here you have to do an introduction with a background just like you would with a scientific publication where you want to talk about prior research give the funding organization or show the funding organization rather that you have done your homework you know what the prior research and stuff has been done and talk about your motivation and how you're going to start building on what others have done also your objectives and by objectives we really mean what are your hypotheses what are your research goals this is where you want to start calling that information out and make it very clear what it is that you're proposing in the proposals and stuff that i've done particularly with NSF usually we'll have just a straight up objective section and we will list numerically and state number one this is one this is the first objective this is the first hypothesis number two this is second and so forth so that it's very clear it's very obvious what it is that you are proposing to do with your particular proposal next since you're probably going to be dealing either with instrumentation or modeling and the majority of the proposals that you're going to be working on you want to go into a little bit more detail about what it is you're going to be doing with them if you need to do observations you need to purchase instruments you need to call that out here you need to explain why that's important what they're going to do the types of data that you expect to collect with those particular types of sensors if it's going to be modeling what's what are the resources you need for the modeling are you going to need supercomputing time where is that supercomputing time going to go is it going to stay with an NCAR is it going to go to another organization how is that going to get paid for what is the expected outcome those sorts of things so instrumentation modeling language all of that is good to put in there as well and again make sure that you're clear so it's obvious what exactly you're going to do and then of course methods when you get into the hypothesis this is a section where you can actually go into a little bit more detail explain a little bit more about what your hypothesis are what you expect to see from the the research and how that research is going to be important what are the expected outcomes why are you doing this what are going to be the long-term benefits from doing that sort of thing so again kind of a high level explanation but these are the things that you want to make sure you absolutely have in any type of project description or statement of work continuing on so that's that's going to be kind of the the first part of your project description there also needs to be a project management component and oftentimes if you put in a proposal it's probably going to be a multi-year proposal many of the NSF proposals can be anywhere from three to five years so you need to do a breakdown by year you want to talk about expected or anticipated results maybe by year or maybe as a whole by the time you get to the end of the actual project itself broader impacts I touched on in the introduction you're going to want to hit hit that pretty hard here again talk about community outreach educational opportunities for graduate students for undergraduate students even potentially postdocs expected student involvement even touch on early career development and when we say early career development we're talking more about you yourself how is this going to help you as an early career scientist develop your career what do you expect to learn from it that sort of thing so all of that is really good information to put into your broader impact statement and then finally there's the current impending support from the sponsor so NSF requires this not all organizations are necessarily going to require this in fact FAA has never required this private industry generally doesn't really care they just want to know what it is that you're going to do type of thing but NSF wants to know if you're being funded under other money from NSF other types of government sponsors things like that just as kind of a background information to them so they know what your base funding is in terms of other projects your other commitments that sort of thing you'll also again talk about intellectual merit and broader impacts for each of those different projects that you're working on so you're you're starting to see a theme here of intellectual merit and broader impacts continually coming up in these various different sections because NSF puts a lot of emphasis on those particular things next you in terms of a biographical sketch you can really just think of this as a shortened CV the emphasis here is going to be on your research or your experience pertinent to what it is that you're proposing these are typically only a couple of pages long and you can see the various different things that go into that it's really just kind of a list of what is your educational background any scientific appointments that you have publications that are relevant to what you're proposing any type of synergistic activities that you're involved with listing your collaborators on some of those different projects or who may be working with you on this one and then also listing your graduate and your thesis advisors just so they again background information for them these are usually pretty quick and easy to put together they're short they're not intended to be long but they give the maximum information to NSF so they know exactly what your your skills are and how it's relevant to what you're proposing the budget probably one of the most important things that's going to go into this aside from the project description is the budget and you really need to think very closely about this because you need to account for everything that you're going to need in a monetary sense for your project to be successful that includes salaries for yourself any postdocs graduate students undergraduate students other personnel software engineers other scientists and stuff that may be helping you out travel needs to be included any type of equipment or materials and supplies that you would be purchasing that needs to go in their computational facilities if you're going to be doing supercomputing you need time on the supercomputers you need to account for the money for that publication costs because you're obviously going to be publishing your results and stuff you need to make sure that you anticipate costs for the publications to build into this any type of subawards if there's another organization that's going to be working with you where the money is going to come to you first and then you need to transfer it to them that's considered a subaward you need to account for that in here also indirect costs overhead benefits that sort of thing all of that goes in here on that particular point I want to say that people like Carolyn and Valerie and Caitlin they are an excellent resource for that sort of thing and a lot of the budget templates that we use when you go in and you fill it out with your travel and salaries and stuff will automatically calculate that stuff for you so you don't have to go in and figure that stuff out on your own a lot of it is already kind of done in the background and then of course you need a budget justification you need to explain for all of these different things exactly why that money is needed and why the amount of money is needed for those different sections and again it's fairly straightforward if you're buying a sensor you'll need to get a quote for that sensor put it in there and say here's the quote for the sensor that's your justification for needing that next slide here facilities equipment other resources again this is an NSF thing it's not so much something that you're going to see in other proposals but you'd want to describe the facilities that we need to use to support the project any type of laboratory use potentially any type of supercomputing use even describing existing equipment that you have maybe from other projects and stuff that's where you want to put this in here to show that you've got other things that you're bringing in that's going to help support this you're not asking for money to build everything from the ground up so all of that would go into this facilities equipment and other resources section and finally the data management plan again it's becoming more and more important especially to organizations like NSF and NASA and NOAA but they want to know what are you going to do with this data particularly once you've done your analysis once you've done your publications if they're paying for you to collect the data they don't want the data to just disappear so what are you going to do in the long term in case there's other scientists other graduate students postdocs that come along that may be able to use that data set for research that they are doing where can you host that data where you can put it somewhere that they have open access to that data and provide an explanation for how that data is going to be archived and disseminated so I think that's that's the last of my slides and again the word daunting comes to mind but if you approach this from the perspective that you're doing this like a publication this is something where you have the opportunity to be creative people like Valerie Carolyn and Caitlin those are the people that are here to help support you help answer questions and they're the ones that are going to walk you through this process and support you in being able to put together a strong type of proposal and also say I myself am here if anybody has any questions you start working on some of these things you're not sure what to do I'm always available I'm always willing to help get a second pair of eyes on especially when it comes to the scientific component when it comes to more of some of these other details on how to get the proposal submitted things like that Valerie, Carolyn, Caitlin all of them are more your your experts for doing that sort of thing but when it comes to writing these things up the material to put in reviewing it I'm more than willing to help you out with that. Scott thank you so much that was really great going through all of these different pieces and and again thank you so much for being available to kind of discuss all these things I know that that's going to be super super useful for everybody. Carolyn, Caitlin I know that you guys are kind of switching off with Valerie going through the next two things so if you want to take it away and just let me know when you want me to move the slides. Yeah thank you go ahead and move to the next slide. Good morning everybody my name is Valerie Cook I've been with NCAR for about 17 years and the probably the focus of my position is on compliance and NCAR is a federally funded research and development center and we do have an overwhelming number of policies that we have to follow so the purpose of my office is to help you navigate that and then also I really enjoy working with others to see where we can navigate flexibility around the rules that we have so my door is always open and happy to answer any questions that you have. Who had mentioned earlier that this series is not going to focus on finding funding opportunities but I did want to let everybody know that that is a big role that our office plays not finding the opportunities but reviewing the opportunities once somebody contacts us and says they're really interested in responding to this announcement we have a full website of all of the announcements that we've reviewed and we've indicated whether or not we're eligible and if there's any other unique things that you need to watch out for so we update that website regularly so it is a great resource even though it doesn't have every single opportunity out there there's also opportunities that come up every single year like the NOAA CPO announcement and we know that we'll have a lot of submissions in response to that announcement we watch for the release of that announcement and then we review it and then send out a mass email to the administrators that this is now available and start preparing for your proposals so I'll talk a little bit about the eligibility review both for sponsors and then a little bit about our PI eligibility various sponsors have different requirements some sponsors may have eligibility requirements by sponsor and overarching eligibility whereas other sponsors are going to do it on an announcement by announcement basis DOE is a great example as well as NSF that just because you were encarved as an FFRDT was eligible on one announcement doesn't mean they'll be eligible on the next announcement so we really want to review every single announcement before you spend any more time pursuing that funding avenue we also have a lot of eligibility restrictions with NSF I am the point of contact with NSF on determining eligibility so I do talk to every program manager to determine if we're eligible or not so our recommendations are to contact your proposal administrator as soon as possible when there's an announcement that you're interested in responding to and then again the entity proposal offices will review those announcements and discuss what the sponsors is appropriate now and I'm speaking to the postdoc group so when we talk about you know finding funding opportunities there is a UCAR-wide PI eligibility guideline I posted the link there postdocs do have to meet specific criteria and your eligibility would need to be approved by your lab or center director as well as encar or UCP entity deputy director so the work we want the work to be specific to the postdoc we would prefer that the work be completed during your employment with UCAR and that the work is a strategic priority for encar now that said that is PI eligibility there are a lot of opportunities for postdocs to serve as co-PI or co-PI on a proposal if you know somebody else within your lab will service PI so there there are opportunities out there I think next slide please here the next thing we want to focus on is when we are sure that we're eligible for an announcement the postdoc is going to serve as PI or co-PI everyone is required to go through a proposal training before submitting a proposal it's a video that we send out it's it's old video we need to redo it but everybody needs to watch it and then you are required to complete a salary access acknowledgement form because within the systems that we have you do have access to salary information so contact your proposal administrator for a link to the training video I'll send that out the video focuses on proposal preparation and submission award management and financial management there's also a lot of registrations required for your sponsor systems so particularly NSF research dot gov and nasa inspires we have to get you registered in those systems and then now a lot of sponsors are requiring completion of your cd and seeing the cds and cmp's and science cv registration is required for that and then another thing to note is that starting in january 2023 NSF is going to require each um PI or co-PI to certify their effort in science cv so we want to get started on all of these processes as soon as possible and at this point I will turn it over to Caitlyn or Carolyn I am up next so hey everyone I'm Caitlyn Quinn I'm an administrator in the high altitude observatory or HAO and I am the proposal or the lead proposal administrator for our group and I've been serving in that capacity for about five years now um I love working on proposals I definitely have the most expertise in nasa and NSF so I tell everyone if you have any questions you want to talk through requirements and specifics um you're always welcome to come chat with me or send me an email set up a meeting um and I just want to thank you you know Valerie and her office the budget and planning office for all of the um sort of guidance that they provide us and the wonderful reviews that they do of our proposals before they go out the door um so I'm just going to take a minute or two here to sort of touch on the proposal development process which um you know we've heard an overview from scott about some of the pieces that go into that but you might be wondering about sort of the timeline and the process and how that all works so um this is sort of representing maybe a more typical um sort of smaller to medium-sized research project of course the timeline for proposal development is going to vary drastically depending on sort of the the opportunity you're participating in but this is sort of a typical example um usually that development process is going to start about three months prior to submission and that will typically coincide with the pre-proposal now what the pre-proposal involves is going to vary by sponsor um in the nasa world that's called a sort of step one um in the NSF world they might call it a preliminary proposal or maybe something called a notice of intent but basically it's sort of a small snippet of your overall proposal that you'll develop well in advance of submission and it gives the funding um uh the sponsor an idea of sort of you know how many submissions they're working with they can start to develop review teams and um it also helps you to sort of hone in on your concept well in advance so typically the step one will involve you know developing your team and maybe an abstract um and you know after you've sort of gone through the process of checking on eligibility getting registered and approved in all of those systems that Valerie mentioned that's when the real work begins um so in those few months before the due date you're going to be working closely with your proposal administrator so someone like me or Caroline um and we're going to help you sort of review requirements develop a proposal timeline and we'll also help you to generate certain content in that proposal like the budget um the budget justification sort of looking at this example block in blue about a nasa proposal maybe all of the content there from biologic sorry biographical sketches all the way down to facilities and equipment um and additionally you're going to be working closely with your mentor and your proposal team the mentor can help you sort of develop teaming maybe identifying co-eyes collaborators who could help you to do that sort of proposed work and of course they will be helping you writing the science and technical proposal um I have highlighted here um bolded sort of the reviewing the solicitation step and I just want to call that out as sort of a very important first step as you're sort of digging into working on the proposal um it kind of helps to go through highlight important information and maybe even start an outline from the solicitation so that your response will sort of follow the exact format that reviewers are going to be looking at um and of course each solicitation has very specific requirements different content and sections and format and then further to complicate things of course uh sponsors different sponsors have different requirements maybe page length requirements are different or the font could be different and those are meant to sort of put boundaries on the length of your proposal and make sure that we sort of have a level playing field when they are evaluating things so that's something you definitely want to keep in mind early you don't want to write your entire proposal and find that your font is too small and you have to cut out entire pages of content that you wrote so it's early or it's important to sort of identify that early and of course if you ever have questions about that definitely work with your proposal admin um if we have questions we can always work with the budget and planning office um so Hugh if you could go to the next slide um I have just sort of put together a sort of um an example of what a proposal development timeline could look like and this is something of course you'd work closely with your proposal admin on so um t minus zero here is going to be the date that your proposal is submitted it leaves the organization and either goes to sponsor if you're the PI or it goes to sort of the lead institution if maybe um you know you're the co-eye on the proposal and they are leading the entire effort but about three months ahead of time is when pre-proposals are typically due so that's when you're going to get the team finalized the abstract will be written you'll probably finalize a title for your future project and then once that's submitted is when the real proposal writing can begin and you'll start to sort of you know interact with your team members getting the outline started and sort of writing the meat of that proposal um maybe about one to two months out before submission is when you'll start working closely with that proposal admin you could start to develop the budget that sort of non-technical content maybe describing you know the the bios the cps things of that nature um and additionally if you are the PI and you have external funded partners um we have to send them requests for proposals they need to provide us with budgets and their own descriptions that we later incorporate to the overall package so you need to give them enough time and their organizations to sort of prepare those documents and get them reviewed and approved um and I'd say maybe sort of the two weeks before the proposal goes out is when things really ramp up um Caroline has some slides that are going to follow that we'll go into this in a bit more detail but these two sort of internal deadlines that you'll see in that green text there that I want to call out are those business days sort of ahead of submission ten business days prior is when the BNP office asks that we get the final budget completed and we respond to something called NCAR criteria responses and that's to sort of certify to um you know because we're in FFRDC and we get that um base funding that this research sort of won't compete with that um so we do that ten business days ahead of time and then three business days before we're planning on submitting we give a full complete package to budget and planning office and they're going to go through all the details make sure that everything is compliant and if they find any issues that gives us a little bit of time to sort of resolve those issues and um and work them into the final submission so I will now pass it over to Caroline and she's going to go into um sort of getting your final proposal ready for submission. Hi everyone so I'm Caroline and I work um in MMM and like Caitlin I help with proposal submission and I've been here for about seven years so almost fast so we have time for questions at the end but you know once you get your final proposal ready your lab you know Caitlin and I and the others we really are the ones that guide it through the next phase so we'll take it we'll upload all the pieces into the submission platform NSF grants.gov we answer all you know the technical questions all the forms at this stage we're trying to make everything look uniform they look good we put dates page numbers you know we are just as excited as you we want you to succeed so we really um work with you to make it look great and we should start all this about three days before the submission or if you're working with a university which a lot of times you know they'll tell us they want a week prior so we have to you know start a week earlier to meet their deadline and you can move forward to you and so this is kind of uh the review process so we are super lucky at NCART to have such a checks and balance system so the first you know you'll get your proposal done we like three days prior I look through it or Caitlin and we make sure everything looks good then we send it through the panda system and your lab director will have a look you know make sure it fits in with your lab's goals implementation plan they want it to look good too and then Valerie and her team are fantastic and they look through it with a fine-tooth comb they make sure it looks through policy they check for grammar and it I mean going out the door we have an extremely high success rate and um you know as Scott mentioned we we do everything but the technical support basically like your admin will be here to help you like develop a budget budget justification we do your CMPs we work with you for your CVs we're really we want you to succeed like I get so excited so um but I can't write your science because I don't know your science so really you have a person right to help you move along and you're not alone and uh you know once we get the final copy I email it to you to say hey does this look good you know are you okay with it and the budget and planning office is the one that will press that button and submit it and then we wait you know it's usually about three to six months and you'll hear uh usually the good news and if not you know um you always say you can try to submit the following year right you have this great idea a lot of PIs will revamp it and submit it the following year and and it's successful so that's it. Everybody thanks you all so much that was so cool I think I can safely say for all of those reasons this is everything that we were really hoping to hear so much about this is great we've got a few minutes left for questions um and so I want to make sure that everybody who wants to ask a question has a chance to ask um I'm going to start with one from Slido really fast from the people who've been posting them on there if you want to keep posting them on there we can also collate those and see if we can find some answers for them moving forward but um I think Caroline this kind of touches on the last point that you made you talked about having a really really good success rate can you give us a sense of kind of what your expected ratio of applications to successfully funded proposals has been does it run the gamut across different kind of departments or different funders or is it generally speaking a pretty solid success rate Valerie might be able to speak too on this you know um I would say extremely highly you know we we put in the best proposals that we can right um if it's a very extremely uh and Valerie can speak some lonely stuff you know three Valerie and her team will actually pick like well if you can go into it Valerie but we do have a high success rate here at probably higher than the university community but it's about 50 50 to 55 success rate universities are around 20 to 30 but it does vary by sponsor and we do have a lot of proposals that we submit that um are not peer reviewed they're called like sole source proposals so the chances of those getting awarded are much much higher so when we look at it on a sponsor by sponsor basis um it it could be around that 30% range so for then for the peer reviewed proposals okay I'm gonna ask if anyone here in person has any questions that they would want to ask a really small question so for budgeting stuff do you have to do I don't know what they're called but universities like a competition essentially like showing bids if it's above X thousand dollars like okay I'm gonna do a survey it's gonna cost 10 grand and I have to show that I did like three different bids do you have to work that I do your grant to a head of time do you want to talk about there's certain expenses if you have to spend above a certain amount of money you have to show that you got the best offer or something like that or explain why you didn't did NCAR have that policy too I'm not quite sure I understand the question so it might not be applicable here well can you repeat that please it's like if you spend over a certain amount of money like in most departments in most universities like across the board it's above five thousand dollars you have to show that you've gotten a bid for that for at least three different vendors or competitors to say that it's worth like you actually have to spend this much money and you're getting the best price on it yeah caroline or katelyn might be um better able to answer that question so that's more on your procurement side yeah um I think it depends I know if like you have maybe materials or something in your budget you'd certainly want to have a basis of estimate because you'll have to communicate that to sponsor in your budget justification I think doing like a sort of um competitive procurement like you are describing would only apply if you had services um I want to say the threshold is over fifteen thousand dollars but I think even at the proposal stage it's probably acceptable to um just sort of state what the basis is for those costs and knowing that in the future you may need to do a competitive bid for those um perhaps if um yeah I want to say that the fifteen thousand dollar is the range is where that gets cut off um and of course you can you can name a partner and if you have a compelling reason that you need to work with them you'd build that into your proposal um but if it's just some generic services to be fulfilled at a future time you would do that you know at the time of award I'm working with the contracts group thank you thanks Kate you do you want to take another question from the Slido and then we'll come back again to the room yeah I think there's just uh we probably just have time for one more question so I'm going to read one more off the Slido that also got uploaded um so I'm going to talk about uh let's see sometimes has been obtaining funding from private or philanthropic sources so how usual are those and are there mechanisms to find those sources I can take that one um so we do occasionally submit proposals to foundations it's not as common um usually you have to develop a relationship with the foundation before you can be eligible to submit a proposal there are a few foundations that have more of an open solicitation process um Schmidt um the best read um announcement is one that we've done recently the ucar president's office does um offer funding available um it's not on a competitive basis sort of like a first come first serve basis because we are required to collect a full indirect and foundations usually only will pay a 10 to 20 indirect rate and so the president's office has agreed to cover the difference um there's a form that has to be completed as we reviewed certain criteria have to be met but um that is a possibility okay perfect thank you Valerie do we have any more burning questions lying around if so please put them in the Slido and then as we're looking forward to some more detailed things and we get past this overview session we're going to be really digging into detail on some of these issues we'll provide those to the speakers um who are going into some of these things moving forward and then we'll make sure that we can get those questions answered as well so if you have any more burning questions please put them in the Slido right now i'm i want to finish off by just saying another huge thank you all of the postdocs for coming and sharing your time with us all of our speakers you guys were so great uh i i can't imagine this having gone better so i really really appreciate all of you so so much and mariana take it away all right this as i uh was side chatting studio and hue this was everything i wanted it to be and more so uh you can manifest it is what i'm saying when you have a team of willing collaborators so i wanted to remind everybody that our next session is on october 6th and that will be with the granting organizations and we're looking where we're going to specifically have a program manager from nsf and noa and fallory will also be joining us to sort out policies and you know the rules of regulation if you will and the other thing to note is you will be getting additional calendar invites that come through for the the remaining sessions but other than that i think we i want to give a round of applause to everybody like this was just great i loved it so thank you for your time and we will be sharing these slides with everyone so you'll get another email for slides for for review because a lot of great information has been populated in there so with that have a if you're in boulder i hear it's rainy and kind of dreary but hopefully you can uh reach rebecca at her cabin and she'll have some hot cocoa for you but other than that a heartfelt thank you to everyone real applause is nice yeah yeah i just i i just just unmuted that every time you know i thought you did that last time i was like oh yeah i'm gonna do that it was like we did the research reviews and there are two people there's like only six of us but each presenter is really funny and so that's like a good like laugh oh that was a really anything people build on the energy and i was like oh it's so good yeah and it's different if everyone's in person yeah it is yeah i feel like this is actually for me it's just like the first ordinary yeah yeah yeah in a good way really