I got the results back from NSF fellowship application today. I didn't get the fellowship, but that doesn't matter. Something funny was that one of
the reviewers said my “proposed project looked simple or at least written that
way.”
I’m the chump working on the taxane project. The
overall goal is in the figure below. You might have seen the
Nature Chemistry paper where we described the construction of the taxane skeleton. My project involves
multiple C-H oxidation transformations on this skeleton en route to Taxol.
Simple, right?
I’m not here to toot my own horn or rally up a pity party,
but I think every chemist familiar with synthetic organic chemistry will
agree this endeavor is somewhere between crazy difficult and flat-out
impossible. No one would claim it looks simple. Then why is this NSF reviewer judging
my application if they don’t see the difficulty of this project?
To be clear, I wouldn't care if I scored “excellent” on
everything and still didn't get the fellowship. There are many people deserving
of this award, and who am I to say I deserve it more than anyone else? Also, there
are plenty of reasons to not fund me or this project. My problem is that
reviewers are unqualified to judge my “intellectual merit” if they don’t know
the basic frontiers of my field. I guess the moral of the story is don’t assume
people know why your science is hard. Be very explicit. This problem probably
applies to some extent to other award applications and even applying for a job.
