My colleagues and I just got a research proposal rejected by the National Science Foundation. The reviewers were very nice about it. All of the reviews were excellent, and the reviewers were all extremely positive about our proposal.
They loved our mission statement, our discussion of broader impact, and our explanation of scientific merit. They thought our scientific paradigm was right on target, and that our research protocol was both properly focused and well thought out.
They clearly loved our proposal. They just didn’t fund it.
That may have had less to do with the relative merits of our submission than with a fairly recent phenomenon — the rapidly dwindling federal budget for evidence based research. I won’t go into the reasons for that, but feel free to follow the evidence. 🙂
I was talking with my colleagues about this odd outcome, and we were wondering what we should do next. Resubmitting an improved version of the proposal next year would be one option, but there didn’t seem to be anything to improve.
I told my colleagues that the situation reminded me of the ending of Casablanca. In the end, Ilsa knows that she will never see Rick again. But it’s ok, because she will spend the rest of her life knowing that he really loves her.