SSHRC PROPOSALS: 41 Ways to Annoy the Committee

(with permission from Doug Peers -- University of Calgary and SSHRC committee member)

The following list is taken from various submitted SSHRC applications

• Insist on flying business class.
• Tell the committee that last year’s committee members were complete idiots
• Claim that nobody has ever done anything vaguely related to your topic before.
• Invent your own format for providing bibliographical information.
• Elicit the committees sympathy with tales of how badly treated you are by your home institution.
• Apply for money to work in an archive that burned down thirty years ago
• Ask for an $8000 notebook when all you need is a simple word processor
• Use the section on extenuating circumstances to bemoan your heavy teaching load.
• Talk about how badly under funded you have been.
• Tell the committee all kinds of things about yourself which were not requested and which are not relevant to the application.
• Do not include anything in your bibliography that has been published in the last ten years.
• Misspell the names of your referees.
• Ignore the rules on page length, margins and spacing.
• Rely exclusively on your spell checker—there is considerable difference between public affairs and pubic affairs.
• Show up before the same committee on three different applications (as principal investigator on one and co-investigator on two others).
• Spread white-out liberally in the application.
• Ignore grammar rules.
• Avoid punctuation.
• Identify the leading figure in the field as an “idiot”.
• Double count publications in your CV.
• List publications more than six years old in the CV section of the application.
• Include a big name on your team but do not define her/his role.
• Avoid paragraphs.
• Fail to explain the reasons for your trips to various places or what you are looking for.
• Handwrite part of the application.
• Under publications, type “too many to list”.
• Add up your budget incorrectly.
• List Wikipedia as a publication.
• Tell the committee that ethics reviews are a waste of time and irrelevant.
• Use the application to carry on a polemical fight with your colleagues in other institutions.
• Ask for $250,000 in total support.
• Insist that you are waiting for the science to catch up with you.
• Insist that there is a conspiracy (feminist, Marxist, right-wing, vegetarian, or all four) out there trying to get you—and then arrange for your external referees to back you up.
• Justify your application to interdisciplinary studies on the basis that your colleagues in your discipline are hopelessly out of date.
• Invent some new acronyms.
• Keep submitting the same application without taking any notice of previous committee’s comments.
• Employ a graduate student to help cart books back and forth from the library.
• Insist that you have nothing to learn from recent scholarship.
• Use as many acronyms as you can but then change their spelling part way through the application.
• Dare the committee to reject you and thereby prove that they are a bunch of hide bound bureaucrats doing Ottawa’s dirty work.
• Put office furniture into your budget.

to top

Last reviewed 12/4/2009 11:42:28 AM