October DPS CSWA Session
by Beatrice Muller
January 1996
Meeting of the Committee for the Status of Women in
Science during the Division for Planetary Science Meeting,
Wednesday, noon-1:30pm, Oct. 11, 1995 at the Kohala
Coast, Hawaii.
Changing the meeting from an evening to a lunch meeting
had the benefit of not conflicting with other events and we
had an attendance of roughly 25 people. We had two topics:
(1) An informal panel discussion about 'Writing a winning
proposal' with Reta Beebe (NMSU), Bonnie Buratti (JPL),
Wendy Calvin (USGS), and Ann Sprague (LPL), talking
about their experience participating in review panels and
their perspective on what is important for proposals.
(2) Targeting exceptional women for award nominations.
Reta started out with some statistics showing that only a
few percent of proposals get funded and funding for new
proposals is even lower. All agreed that it is therefore
important to do half the work before submitting the
proposal. Talk to the proposal contact person, ask a lot of
questions, find out what the 'hot' topics are, contact people
who got funded and find out about their proposal. Get the
names of people who served on earlier panels and put them
on your preprint list. Name recognition counts. For the
proposal itself, isolate a problem, focus on it, and propose
for the maximum amount of time. Make sure, you include
the big picture and the relevance to the program you are
proposing to. Include preprints in your proposal. First
author papers are important. Sell your proposal. It is very
rare that a first time applicant gets funded. Do not give up.
Read the comments from the review panels carefully,
improve your proposal and try again. And don't forget, that
luck also plays a role. A lively discussion followed with
additional people sharing their experience with writing
proposals and sitting on panels.
On the second topic, we agreed that if women don't get
nominated for awards they cannot get awards. A discussion
started how to improve this situation. We did not want to act as a 'lobby'. Award nominations take time, mostly to
gather the relevant information needed for supporting a
candidate. Raising the awareness of what is needed and
collaborating with each other using our network seemed to
be a good starting point. Making a small committment of
not tossing out the next call for nominations thinking
others will surely do it comes to mind, too.
The meeting was very successful and I hope that all the
participants got as much inspiration from it as I did. The
above excerpt is my impression of the meeting and is by no
means complete or objective.
Beatrice Muller is Chair of the DPS CSWA and a
Research Associate at Kitt Peak National Observatory/
National Optical Astronomy Observatories, Tucson, AZ
Back to January 1996 Contents
Back to STATUS Table of Contents
|
