I Found the Sheep, Are the Rest of You Goats?

Sorting out the stack of grant applications is hard. There are not quite 30 of them. I’m supposed to rank them in order of preference on a scale of 1-5. Then, together with the rankings of the other committee members, the group will be narrowed to about 18 people who will be interviewed. So, my choices aren’t actually decisive or determinitive just yet, though they do have an impact.

The biggest relief for me is that I don’t know most of the people who applied that aren’t members of the public interest society, or at least I only know them by name. That makes it a bit easier to be impartial—and it means that I won’t have to feel guilty if a friend didn’t get a grant.

There were a group of 8 or so that were really good. I had some difficulty assigning rankings within the group, but it was clear that these were the top of the lot. Then there were four or five that were clearly the bottom of the lot—a couple where the proposed project isn’t public interest work, a couple where the applicant obviously spent less than 20 minutes on the application and didn’t make a very good case for getting a chunk of money from us, and one memorable one where the person is already getting paid a decent wage (or at least, a liveable wage) by the organization. That leaves me with a whole, whole bunch that are all about the same level of mediocre.

I’ve been evaluating these applications by relying heavily on the part of the application explaining why the proposed work is in the public interest. That’s gotten me as far as three groupings: Mother Theresa, Volunteering at a Soup Kitchen, and Writing a Check to the Local Women’s Shelter. All worthwhile endeavors, but involving differing levels of impact and commitment. Now I have to figure out how to rank within these groups. Preference is supposed to go to those who have been active in the public interest society and to 1Ls, so I’ll have to try and find some method along those lines.

The thing that really got my goat is that one of the applicants claimed credit in her statement of involvement in the public interest sociey and general volunteer work for a lot of things that I did. I mean, really! How retarded do you have to be to claim credit for something that a member of the committee did—you’re going to be found out as soon as the person reads your statement! Or maybe I should just plain be insulted—obviously, she must think I’m so stupid that I won’t notice. If I had my druthers, I would disqualify her from consideration immediately. I guess I’ll have to settle for ranking her near the bottom of the list.