The External Funding Blues

So for those of you who don't know, though I'm sure the majority of the readership for this blog does, OGS stands for "Ontario Graduate Scholarship" (although my friends likes to refer to it as the "Orbiting Garbage System"), and SSHRC stands for Social Sciences and Humanities Research council, and is pronouced "shirk" which ironically, is a verb meaning "to avoid work or duty" which is what graduate students routinely do with their proposal writing, making the phrase "I'm shirking SSHRC" the ubiquitous response to the question "what are you doing today?" amongst graduate students during application time.

Basically what these grants translate into is $. Both of these government agencies provide funding to worthy projects at the graduate student level. The only trouble is you have to prove that your project (and you) are worthy! AND, you don't really quite know what they're looking for. So upon my return, my proposals for OGS and SSHRC are taking up the majority of my life right now, though I still have to keep up with school work, hence why I am writing this blog...

At least it's cathartic.

So before I left for my trip, I met with a few professors regarding my proposals and one of them advised me to reorganize the whole thing. So that's what I'm doing (reticently) now. It's very hard to maintain a critical distance from your own work. I put so much effort into this, and I don't want to change it, but I see why it needs to be done. I had arranged my proposal chronologically, going through the texts in the order in which they were published. My professor very wisely advised me to seperate the sections based on the different subject-positions (race, class, gender) that I will be analyzing. It makes more sense, but it's so much more work. I like my friend's idea of just writing "please?" at the end of this and hoping for the best! I am going to keep working on this until the last hour, but it's becoming quite onerous. I also have heaps and heaps of grading to do, and I don't feel like reading undergraduate writing at the moment. I am so stressed out. It sucks to be back. Can I go back to Amsterdam now?!