DBT-India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship Application Experience

Since DBT-IA was the most professional grant agency I've dealt with in India, my experience with them deserves its own post. 

Their instructions were always crystal clear. Their webinars were always to the point and helpful. The first step is a preliminary application which is a short summary of the project and several other details about your career trajectory. If shortlisted, you are invited to submit a full proposal and you get around 30 days since the notification to submit this full proposal.

The proposal itself is a hefty undertaking with lots of sections to fill beyond the proposal. Therefore, they get a complete and thorough picture of your trajectory and your future research vision and how the grant will likely help you get where you want to go. My proposal was based on ideas I had in my Google docs for several years now but it takes an incredible amount of work to communicate the ideas effectively within the 3500 word limit. I roped in my lab members to help me make some figures while I worked on the text. My first draft was of course terrible. I sent it to my mentors and a few colleagues. I got valuable critical feedback from all of them but by the time I got this feedback, it was already 2 days before the deadline. At this point, based on the feedback, I decided that I needed to rewrite the whole grant to improve not just some of the ideas but also to enhance coherence of the ideas across my aims. I sat down for 30 continuous hours to be able to rewrite the grant and submit it on time. It was nerve-wracking to do all this and ensure that all my letters of support from mentors and collaborators were submitted on time. There was one letter that was not submitted due to the letter writer not clicking on a button at the end of the process. The IA staff were extremely helpful and they were able to submit it on my behalf from the backend. So I managed to get the full proposal submitted just in the nick of time after a complete rewrite initiated 30 hours before the deadline.

These efforts paid off when I was shortlisted for the interview. The interview was an incredibly professionally handled affair as well. I invested a ton of energy and time into preparing for the interview. I roped in all the help I could possibly get from my colleagues at IIITH, mentors outside IIITH, and scientifically trained friends. I scheduled a mock interview at IIITH and roped in senior colleagues from both within and outside of cogsci to serve on this panel. Again, I got incredibly useful feedback. I also practiced my 5 minute presentation with several colleagues and friends. My best friend, Deepak, a research scientist at Toyota Research Institute (Boston) met with me twice to help me refine the talk further. He even gave me tips on intonation! With all of their help, I was able to prepare a pretty refined 5 minute presentation.

The interview room was intimidating with 10-15 people, all highly accomplished life sciences researchers from around the world, seated at a U-shaped table and you stand at the center of it with a white board to one side and a projector screen to the left. The presentation went well and I saw many nodding heads on the panel. The panel then asked relevant questions and seemed interested in helping me do the work by even offering specific advice about things to include on the IRB applications and consent forms. That is how detail-oriented they were. I think the interview went as well as it could possibly have gone and so now I wait anxiously for the final decision as the competition is probably extremely tough given all the accomplished people who have returned to India in the last few years to take up faculty positions at IISc, NCBS, IITs, IISERs and many other good universities and institutes. So there is no guarantee but this is the first time I've been really optimistic about something in academia. The stakes are higher for me given the lack of data collection infrastructure at my institute currently relative to others who may be at places which already have EEG/fMRI and other rigs to enable their cog-neuro work. Hence the anxiety. I probably slept better before the interview than after! It is a strange state to be in.

If we get the fellowship and the equipment requested, it means we get a state-of-the-art high density EEG lab with eye-tracking at IIITH and moreover be able to collect some fMRI data at NBRC for a very exciting memory study. My hope then is that it will not only enable work in my lab but will benefit my colleagues as well. Most importantly, I think this will make a real difference to our ability to recruit good faculty and students going forward. I would really like to contribute to building up our cognitive science program to one of the best in the country in every way. Right now, we are more focused on mental health and AI/ML applications. There is a lot more room for core cognitive (neuro)science fundamental research and I hope that the center and the institute share my vision for such a trajectory, especially when it comes to future faculty hiring, so that we have a balanced center with both fundamental and applied strengths in the future.

Update: I got news that the application was unsuccessful. One review said that the aims were incoherent and that the scope was way too broad whereas another review said that the proposal was very coherent but that I had missed one experimental condition they would have included, and had I included that, the proposal would have made a major impact (I disagree of course but that is how things go). Reviewer 2 got things factually outright wrong. So I guess my funding troubles continue.. but academia is a game of persistence. We will make it eventually.