SSHRC is pronounces SHIRK
Oct. 22nd, 2010 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trouble*mutter* I still can't hear our of my left ear (I think it's worse today than yesterday). It's probably just ... some sort of tubal blockage thingy. Don showed me the pictures and pointed out the tube, and now I can't remember the name of it. I've had this happen before when I flew with a cold, so I'm fairly certain it'll go away on its own, but if it's still a problem on Monday I'll call the doctor. Stupid ear. (Oh, it's totally the tube thing, just being upright and moving around is making some of the blockage seep away. Darn, I was hoping to use this as an excuse not to go to the seminar today. "I'd go, but I can't hear!")
It's SSHRC application time! Please consider me to be flailing about being anxious about the whole thing. In good news, one of the two people I wanted to approach about being one of my referee letters said yes!
For those who don't know much about the SSHRC, I'm applying again for the PhD SSHRC. It's a $35,000/year over four years grant for doing one's PhD, and it basically means that you can go anywhere in Canada, assuming you find a university that has a suitable adviser for your work. Getting funding is the big key in getting into PhD work in Canada - for what I want to do, you can't "self-fund", you need scholarships and grants (no loans).
The competition for a SSHRC, as you can imagine, is pretty damn high. Each university has a quota about how many SSHRC applications they can send up to Ottawa. My university can send 24 this year, and last year they had 49 applications. Each application is first ranked at the department level just in a flat order: "This is our best, this is our second best..." Then all the applications received are ranked throughout the university in the same way. I apparently did fairly well at the department level, but was politely declined by the university last year.
The university then takes the top 24 applications and sends them to Ottawa. There, they're divided up and committees each rank 200-ish applications on a scale of 1 to 10 on a recursive scale, which means they can assign one 10, two 9, four 8s, etc. People with the highest committee-ranked score get HUGE scholarships (CGS, which I can't remember what it stands for, but it means LOTS of money) and then ranks down from there. If you don't get an 8 or something from every person, you get 0 dollars.
FUN TIMES.
They rank you on your grades (ew, although I did very well in my two doctoral courses), your CV (which is better for me this year than last), your research proposal, and your letters of reference. Apparently my uni did poorly last year, and speculation was it was the letters of references were not 1000000% brilliant. Apparently they're also going to be counting grades twice as hard at the uni level (which they're not supposed to do because the SSHRC PhD doesn't weigh grading as being any more important than any of the other things).
You may have heard me rant that my uni is one of the GG13 universities, which means it's one of the 13 universities in Canada that's considered a "research" university. I think this means it offers PhDs. We're apparently a very poor GG13 university, from what I've gathered. We have, for example, no 24 hour study space available on campus, which may seem like a minor thing, but every university I've attended since AUC, which was a university-college, had 24 hour study space available. We're really bad at getting grant money, all things considered. We're a good university, but we're not where the administration would like us to be. (Another example of this is we have a quote of 5 applications to the Really Big Vanier Scholarship, and we've never actually had 5 applications to send on. The Vanier is that one that counts "student leadership", which is code for "I was on student council and all I got was a bunch of things that will look good on a CV". I have ranted about this before.)
Admin has apparently decided the answer to this is to make it even more difficult to be considered for grants. I think the answer for this is to work harder with the students to make their grant applications shine. Lucky for me, my department agrees, and yesterday we had our second meeting this week discussing how to apply for a SSHRC, and several of the professors who have been very successful at getting SSHRCs, or have even sat on the selection committees, came around and read the proposals and gave a lot of feedback.
My SSHRC proposal got a lot of positive feedback this week, so I'm feeling pretty confident about it. I have no idea if it will go anywhere - I goofed off a lot in my undergrad until my third year at AUC, but I also spent a year (or was it two?) at UofA when I was really really really sick, and kept going to classes rather than dropping out like a smart person, so my AUC marks count a lot less than my "I'm stupidly doing this even though I should obviously be in a hospital" marks from UofA because... that's the way the cookie crumbles. I'm hoping my good marks at SMU and my good MA class grades pull me up enough. Because if I get a SSHRC, we're blowing this pop stand oh so very quickly.
It's SSHRC application time! Please consider me to be flailing about being anxious about the whole thing. In good news, one of the two people I wanted to approach about being one of my referee letters said yes!
For those who don't know much about the SSHRC, I'm applying again for the PhD SSHRC. It's a $35,000/year over four years grant for doing one's PhD, and it basically means that you can go anywhere in Canada, assuming you find a university that has a suitable adviser for your work. Getting funding is the big key in getting into PhD work in Canada - for what I want to do, you can't "self-fund", you need scholarships and grants (no loans).
The competition for a SSHRC, as you can imagine, is pretty damn high. Each university has a quota about how many SSHRC applications they can send up to Ottawa. My university can send 24 this year, and last year they had 49 applications. Each application is first ranked at the department level just in a flat order: "This is our best, this is our second best..." Then all the applications received are ranked throughout the university in the same way. I apparently did fairly well at the department level, but was politely declined by the university last year.
The university then takes the top 24 applications and sends them to Ottawa. There, they're divided up and committees each rank 200-ish applications on a scale of 1 to 10 on a recursive scale, which means they can assign one 10, two 9, four 8s, etc. People with the highest committee-ranked score get HUGE scholarships (CGS, which I can't remember what it stands for, but it means LOTS of money) and then ranks down from there. If you don't get an 8 or something from every person, you get 0 dollars.
FUN TIMES.
They rank you on your grades (ew, although I did very well in my two doctoral courses), your CV (which is better for me this year than last), your research proposal, and your letters of reference. Apparently my uni did poorly last year, and speculation was it was the letters of references were not 1000000% brilliant. Apparently they're also going to be counting grades twice as hard at the uni level (which they're not supposed to do because the SSHRC PhD doesn't weigh grading as being any more important than any of the other things).
You may have heard me rant that my uni is one of the GG13 universities, which means it's one of the 13 universities in Canada that's considered a "research" university. I think this means it offers PhDs. We're apparently a very poor GG13 university, from what I've gathered. We have, for example, no 24 hour study space available on campus, which may seem like a minor thing, but every university I've attended since AUC, which was a university-college, had 24 hour study space available. We're really bad at getting grant money, all things considered. We're a good university, but we're not where the administration would like us to be. (Another example of this is we have a quote of 5 applications to the Really Big Vanier Scholarship, and we've never actually had 5 applications to send on. The Vanier is that one that counts "student leadership", which is code for "I was on student council and all I got was a bunch of things that will look good on a CV". I have ranted about this before.)
Admin has apparently decided the answer to this is to make it even more difficult to be considered for grants. I think the answer for this is to work harder with the students to make their grant applications shine. Lucky for me, my department agrees, and yesterday we had our second meeting this week discussing how to apply for a SSHRC, and several of the professors who have been very successful at getting SSHRCs, or have even sat on the selection committees, came around and read the proposals and gave a lot of feedback.
My SSHRC proposal got a lot of positive feedback this week, so I'm feeling pretty confident about it. I have no idea if it will go anywhere - I goofed off a lot in my undergrad until my third year at AUC, but I also spent a year (or was it two?) at UofA when I was really really really sick, and kept going to classes rather than dropping out like a smart person, so my AUC marks count a lot less than my "I'm stupidly doing this even though I should obviously be in a hospital" marks from UofA because... that's the way the cookie crumbles. I'm hoping my good marks at SMU and my good MA class grades pull me up enough. Because if I get a SSHRC, we're blowing this pop stand oh so very quickly.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-23 12:13 am (UTC)