The Bang for The Buck of NSF
My personal story about how a modest NSF investment changed my life and had a ripple effect, and why we need to fight to preserve and expand this organization
Hello everyone,
I feel compelled to write something given the anti-science cuts that are going on in the United States, especially since I have personally benefited from the generosity of National Science Foundation (NSF) grants in the past. The general public likely does not realize how much bang for the buck we get with these grants, and how foolish it is to cut them (if anything, we should be expanding them!). My story is just a drop in the bucket, but that's kind of the point since the NSF changed my life.
First, when I was an undergraduate sophomore in 2009, the summer opportunity I expected to do was suddenly cut off. I was then lucky enough to receive an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) fellowship at Duke University (I am infinitely grateful to Martha Absher for selecting me for this opportunity). The cost of this was less than $10k per student, but it had an immeasurable impact on my academic trajectory. Before the program, I did not know how much I would enjoy academic research, and that this was even an option for me; I'd always assumed I would be a software engineer, but I'd lost my excitement for this career option at the time, and I felt lost about my career in general. This program completely reinvigorated my excitement for future career options.
Then, a few years later, I was lucky enough to obtain an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (NSFGRFP) for my Ph.D. studies. At the time, this came with a $30k stipend for 3 years, amounting to a total of $90k. But again, this relatively modest investment had an outsized impact on my trajectory. By the time I reached the second year of my Ph.D., I was languishing in a toxic lab environment was a bad fit for my skills, my morals, and my personality. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have "mastered out" of the program, since students who switch labs are often viewed as damaged goods by other potential academic advisers who might not be willing to take a risk. In my case, though I came with my own funding, so I was no risk at all. I ended up being able to join the nascent "Information Initiative at Duke" (IID), and was in fact the first graduate student to set foot in the new office space for that program in third floor of Gross Hall. I had the time of my intellectual life in this community, beginning my contributions to topological data analysis and music information retrieval, and beginning my role as an undergraduate mentor and teacher. (Click here to see some press about a snapshot of part of my life at that time). Again, this never would have happened without NSF funding. Every year I did an annual report for the NSF, I profusely thanked them and asked them to use my story to help expand funding for students like me.
Thanks to these experiences, I was eventually able to secure a faculty position at Ursinus College, a small liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia, and I have now seen four cycles of students through their education from their freshman year to graduation. I have even been able to participate on the other side as a faculty mentor in an NSF REU of our own. So this has all had an obvious ripple effect.
Beyond research training, it's worth mentioning how important it is to have a government agency to fund basic science research without any particular agenda. For instance, Benjamin Kuipers has a great essay about how crucial it is to have an alternative to military funding in academia. Though I will leave the majority of that discussion for people who use the funding more for basic science than I have.
I shouldn't have to spell out the economic impacts this has either. I fear that the point of the cuts that the Trump/DOGE administration is making are not for economic reasons, though, but rather for explicitly anti-intellectual purposes. So I expect these arguments to fall on deaf ears to the powers that be. I hope, though, that the general public wakes up and realizes how crucial this kind of government funding is to research and training and how it can change peoples' lives for the better, because this may not be immediately obvious to those outside of academia. And to reiterate once again: we are not asking for much! This funding is paltry in the grand scheme of the government budget!
Sincerely, and with a mix of gratitude and grave concern,
Chris Tralie, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Mathematics, Computer Science, And Statistics
Ursinus College
P.S. I hope to use this blog primarily for fun math and computing topics to complement my youtube videos. But sometimes other events take precedence…