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Is it common for a first-year PhD student to feel lost.is this normal?

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Growing 165 pts 1 follower
Posted
Psychology

What I need help with

I am preparing my first SERB Core Research Grant proposal. My research area is structural health monitoring using IoT sensors.

Specific questions:

  1. What is the typical review timeline.how many months between submission and decision?
  2. Is the budget justification section as important as the technical merit section?
  3. Should I include international collaborators or is that a distraction for a first application?
  4. What is the realistic success rate for first-time applicants?

I am applying as an Assistant Professor with 2 years of post-PhD experience and 6 publications.

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6 Replies

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Yogesh Pandey Growing 70 pts · Accepted answer

FDR (Benjamini-Hochberg) is widely accepted and preferable to Bonferroni when you have many tests and limited power. The key is to be explicit about which correction you used and why.

On replication: No independent cohort is a genuine limitation but not a dealbreaker for rare disease research, where cohort availability is a known constraint. Many high-quality papers acknowledge this and still get published in good journals. Frame it as future work.

Power analysis: Yes, report it. Showing you are aware of the limitation is better than not mentioning it.

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Amit Joshi Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

I think you are conflating two separate problems here. The publish-or-perish culture creates pressure, yes.but the solution is not to criticize researchers who are navigating an unfair system. The real problem is with evaluation committees who treat publication count as a proxy for research quality. Fix the evaluation, and the incentives change.

Also worth noting: open review has been implemented in some fields and has its own problems. It can disadvantage early-career researchers who fear retaliation from senior colleagues they have reviewed critically.

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Replying to Amit Joshi
Tara Singh Starting 5 pts · Accepted answer

For longitudinal data with missing values, mixed-effects models handle this more gracefully than imputation in most cases.

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Replying to Amit Joshi
Wajid Khan Growing 110 pts · Accepted answer

Just to make sure I understand the Zotero workflow correctly.is the .bib file synced to Overleaf automatically every time you add a new paper, or do you need to trigger an export manually?

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Tara Singh Starting 5 pts · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

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Lalitha Mohan Active 230 pts · Accepted answer

This is really helpful context. One more question: for the ethics committee approval, does the institution where the data is collected or the institution where the analysis is performed need to be the primary ethics approver?