Q&A

Q: Describe a day in the life of an NSF Program Director? What is the time commitment?

A: One third of National Science Foundation (NSF) employees are rotators, half the program directors are rotators, and the rest are federal employees. There is an employee union, which means full-time folks are expected to work a 40-hour per week contract period with set hours. This has felt like quite an adjustment from academic life in which you need to get your work done and it doesn’t matter when, or how long, it takes. 

At the moment, I’m expected to come to the NSF building for 5 days out of every 10 workdays (because people are paid on a two-week period), and I get to have an office there. However, the NSF is located in Virginia, and I live in Maryland for the year (for my kids’ schools). This means I have over an hour of commute on the metro and bus system each way to work. I can get to NSF by 8:30 a.m. or so if I leave the house at 7:15 a.m. before both my kids are at school. Other days, I can tele-work from home.

No matter where I am, I spend my day in a mixture of meetings with other NSF employees about different agency matters; meetings with prospective or current principle investigators (usually faculty members who are applying for an NSF grant or have already received one) about current funding opportunities or questions in applications; and processing through proposals as well as annual reports for existing awards. As I review the proposals, I recommend for funding or decline to recommend.

Sometimes I’m asked to weigh in on legislation that someone is proposing to introduce to Congress, and I have had to go through a lot of training for this. Sometimes the training has  perks, including visits to the White House and the Library of Congress!

Q: What professional strengths must you possess to perform the job effectively? How do you know if you are ready to take on this role?

A: I think you need to be able to think big picture about what kinds of funding the research field and research community need and how to get there, and think through small details, like moving the process forward in reviewing and approving people’s annual reports, putting the right reviewers together on review panels, and providing them with what they need to know (given they are also busy people). There’s strategic thinking and administration on a day-to-day basis.

The best part is talking with prospective project investigators about their ideas, and current project investigators about what they’re learning–but you don’t have a lot of time and neither do they. So, you need to be able to glean the main strengths and weaknesses of their idea from talking with them and reading a short, one-page document they send you as well as be able to connect their proposal with NSF policy and goals and your own funding project goals. You don't have much time, but you've got to give them good advice and feedback. To be effective, you should like to read, write, get to the heart of the matter quickly, and keep things moving.

Q: What are the logistics in taking on the role?  How did this impact you and your family personally? (think relocation, kids schooling, etc.)

A: It's been a bit more challenging than I expected, actually. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I  forgot how much time it takes to get kids set up with new schools and doctors; sort out where you get your groceries and prescriptions; and figure out where to get your car serviced, how to learn how to work in a new office, and so on. My partner needed to get permission to work remotely for the year, and he did, so I’m grateful for that. He largely gets the kids from the bus and manages their homework and music practice and starting dinner. For my part, I usually try to get into the NSF early and stay late to make it worth the commuting time, so it ends up being a 12-hour day (and almost $14 for the commute) when I go to the office. The other days, I can telework from home, which really helps logistically with managing the kids’ doctor’s appointments (and my own), allergy shots, the dog, things with the house, and so on. 

One thing I didn’t anticipate was how NSF work is really a 9-to-5 job, and you must use only NSF equipment to do NSF work (and only NSF work). With Purdue, I have been able to easily coordinate personal and professional work because I could put both schedules on one computer, sync my calendars, have my gmail and my University email in the mail app, and text people through the messages app on my computer rather than paying attention to my phone. But to keep my NSF work secure, I can't sync my apps across devices. So I end up having two computers and two calendars and double the places to check, and that’s been an unexpected challenge.

Q: Why did you consider this to be the right time in your life for you to take on this role from a personal perspective?

A: I had always thought I might like to do this work. I have had more than a handful of friends, at one point or another, in this same kind of position, and it always sounded interesting. I became a full professor in 2021, so I didn’t feel the same kind of research grind as I had pre-promotion. In the fall 2023, I was contacted by someone at NSF who thought I would be a good fit. At the time,  I was finishing a sabbatical and some of my students had just graduated. Because the sabbatical had me somewhat disconnected from the day-to-day at Purdue, it was easy to see myself being able to switch gears to take on this new role. Because I’m not leaving Purdue, I was permitted to take on this temporary detail without having to wait a year post-sabbatical. While I'm in the program director role, the NSF gives Purdue a grant to pay most of my salary and to pay for folks to cover my teaching. The NSF also gives me time as part of my regular work to keep mentoring students and doing my own research. 

Q: How are you achieving a work/life balance through all of this?

A: Six months in, my work-life balance has not been great for me so far because 1) there’s been so much to learn so I feel constantly behind on the things I know I need to be doing (i.e. processing proposals and making funding recommendations), and 2) I still have a bunch of responsibilities at Purdue but no formal day-to-day time in which to do them. Your research time needs to come in light of when it works for your NSF work, and because I didn’t have a sense of norms when I started, I put off my Purdue work to be outside of my regular workday. However, because the permanent employees at NSF are largely unionized, and because of government expectations, there really is a 9-5 work culture at NSF. At this point, I know more than I did, and I have been able to begin to gain some of that work-life balance back. I can see things improving going forward. 

It has been great, though, to be in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area. My family and I try to do a “DC” thing every weekend. Last weekend, we went to the Air and Space Museum out by Dulles Airport and saw the Concorde and Discovery Space Shuttle. This weekend, we had a tour of the White House. It really helps to be able to focus on this place and show my kids things that I hope they’ll remember throughout their lives. As a bonus, my sister lives only two hours away, so it is much easier for us to visit each other and have our kids visit their cousins. 

Q: How has taking on this responsibility benefited you professionally?

A: It has been extraordinary. This role has helped me to understand grant writing and grant management totally different from the way I viewed them as a researcher. I see the connections between NSF’s mission and how program officers have set up their programs–over “generations” of program officers–and what researchers want to do, and I see how to line up one’s research arguments to make it clear how you’re doing both scientifically fundamental work *and* helping NSF meet its own goals.

I see all the different ways people across the country, in all kinds of different institutions, are doing engineering education research. I have a much better understanding of the broad landscape of engineering education research and the specifics of how people do that work–whether at their primarily undergraduate institution, two-year institution, with industry partners, or with international partners. I never understood all the different ways researchers could apply for NSF support, or the ways in which program officers are eager to support good and strong ideas. My faculty life is going to be very different when I get back to it, and I’m looking forward to sharing what I’ve learned with colleagues when I return.