If You Missed the Grant and Money Postings on Twitter.....

We’ve posted a lot of grant and funding opportunities on Twitter, but haven’t replicated them for easy use on the blog. So, today, consider your wish our command and enjoy the list of grant programs or RFPs we’ve posted. In no particular order:

Due Soon:

1. The Gulf Coastal Plains and Ozarks, LLC is a partnership involving many volunteers working to achieve common landscape conservation goals, mainly centered on the Gulf states, but also including the Mississippi River Watershed. Currently, they have issued an RFP to address priority knowledge gaps, and applications are DUE AUGUST 30, 2013. 
2. James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation provides mid-career grants to “those working in preservation, landscape architecture, urban design, environmental planning, decorative arts, architectural design, and architectural history.” Those mid-career grant applications are DUE SEPTEMBER 15, 2013.
3. The Great Lakes Basin Program for Soil Erosion and Sediment Control is a federal/state partnership working to improve water quality, land use, and agricultural productivity. Round Two grant applications are due September 6, 2013. 

Other Foundations:

1. Prairie Biotic Research, Inc. offers small ($1,000) grants to support the study of species in U.S. prairies and savannas.
2. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation supports “original research and broad-based education related to science, technology, and economic performance; and to improve the quality of American life.”
3. The Eppley Foundation for Research supports “advanced scientific research” in medicine, life sciences, and the physical sciences on novel insights “unlikely to be underway elsewhere.”
4. The Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc. supports projects that “advance the science of chemistry, chemical engineering and related sciences as a means of improving human relations and circumstances.”
5. According to their webpage, the Great Lakes Fishery Trust provides “funding to nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, and government agencies to enhance, protect, and rehabilitate Great Lakes fishery resources.”
6. The Tree Fund supports research and education in arboriculture and urban forestry. They provide many grants and scholarships that are due at various times.
7. The Surdna Foundation “seeks to foster sustainable communities in the United States…distinguished by healthy environments, strong local economies, and thriving cultures.” Letters of inquiry are accepted on a rolling basis, but grant applications must be invited.
8. We haven’t posted this, but we found the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Grant Programs page a very useful list of different foundations that support conservation research and application. 

Federal Grants:

This is nowhere near an exhaustive list of available Federal Grants (see grants.gov if that’s your hope, and good luck), but here are grants that are open and we’ve posted.

1. There’s our grant opportunity—funding by a joint agreement between the National Institutes for Water Resources and the Army Corp of Engineers, this grant application is DUE AUGUST 15, 2013. If you are an Illinois researcher interested in applying for this grant, you should contact us. If you are out-of-state, see NIWR’s listing of state institutes to find out whom you should contact.
2. The U.S. EPA has a very nice listing of open RFPs on their website. Many of these are closing in August and September.
•      Including this grant available to Great Lakes cities for green infrastructure development. Due September 15, 2013.

   

Scholarships, Fellowships, and Grants for Illinois Students

A listing of some of the funding sources available to students from and in Illinois. If we missed your organization, and you would like to be included, please contact us.

Illinois Only:

• The Illinois Water Environment Association awards two annual $1,000.00 scholarships to students preparing for careers in the water sector. Applications are due November 1, 2013 until January 31, 2014. Scholarships are awarded at the IWEA meetings in March. Full information can be found on IWEA’s website. 
• The Illinois Section of the American Water Works Association provides a variety of scholarships, including undergraduate, adult continuing education, and high school enrichment. While the 2014 scholarships are not yet open, the application deadline is usually January 31. Complete information can be found here.
• The Illinois Groundwater Association provides small research grants on a biannual basis to both graduate and undergraduate students attending a college or university in Illinois. Research must address topics relevant to Illinois groundwater.
• The Association of Illinois Soil and Water Conservation Districts provides a $500 award to agriculture students enrolled in an Illinois state college. Applications are due in May and awarded for the fall semester.
• The Illinois Lakes Management Association offers an Undergraduate/Graduate scholarship of $1,000 for students enrolled in an Illinois college or Illinois residents attending college in Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, or Wisconsin and studying lake or watershed related topics. They also provide the Robert Esser Student Achievement Scholarship for $500, which is offered to Illinois residents attending Illinois colleges. Both applications are due December 31. Full information about both scholarships is available here.

National or International:

• The Society of Wetland Scientists provides student research grants of up to $1,000 to both undergraduate and graduate members of the organization. Applications are due in February and awarded at the annual meetings. Application packages require a proposal, budget, curriculum vitae, and two letters of recommendation.
• Pathfinder Fellowships from the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) provide up to $5,000.00 to graduate students for travel for multisite or multidisciplinary water science research. The application period opens August of 2013 and closes in October.
• The Ivanhoe Foundation provides small fellowships to Masters students from developing countries conducting water related research in the United States. Applications include a description of the projects and a nomination letter from the student’s professor.  
• The American Water Works Association provides information about a myriad of (mostly) graduate level scholarships. Deadlines vary, but for those of you interested in drinking water or water supply, make sure you take a good look at their Scholarship page.
• The American Water Resources Association makes two $2,000 scholarships to one graduate and one undergraduate student member of AWRA. Applications are due in April. Awards are based on academic performance, research, and water-related extra-curricular activities.

Applying for Water Jobs: Tips from a Hiring Manager

On WaterJobs we have written about careers and the future of jobs in water.  But how do you actually land a job in water or any other field? As the assistant director and de facto HR rep for IWRC, I have done a lot of searches – 13 in the last 3 years if memory serves. I can usually say yes or no in the first 10 minutes of an interview. Here are a couple of my observations about what to do and what not to do when you are applying and interviewing

1. Write a good cover letter. I like a good letter. I put more stock in cover letters than I do in resumes. If you get my name wrong or the job title messed up, I don’t go any further. If your generic letter could be sent to anyone, I am skeptical. Even if you will take just about anything, you have to show me that you want MY job, and your letter is the place to start. (For more advice on how to write a good cover letter, check out these posts from Ask a Manager and Engineer Jobs).
2. Don’t call unless you have a real question. I have had more than one well-dressed person show up at my office to “turn in their resume” (we do it all electronically these days) or introduce themselves around the time applications are due. Maybe it is different in the private sector, but visits don’t get any brownie points from me. In fact, I usually just get annoyed. Of course, if you have a legitimate question that will determine whether you apply for or will accept the position, then please ask, but otherwise, I’ll call you.
3. Don’t try to hide things. If you have something funky on your resume, I will notice it and wonder about it. I once received a resume that didn’t have any dates on it. Had the person been out of work for a while? Were they really young, or really old? Was their experience in our area in the distant past or really minimal? We can’t and won’t discriminate, but all things being equal, I will interview the people who don’t leave me wondering. That said, you can go too far. I read a cover letter that discussed the candidate’s arrest history and why it was really nothing to worry about. Maybe so, but I probably wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t mentioned it. I guess the moral is: tell me if I will wonder, but don’t open doors that don’t need to be opened.
4. Follow the instructions. In a recent search, a candidate submitted a resume and many very impressive, but unsolicited transcripts. Nice, but this person didn’t submit a cover letter as per the very clear guidelines. Case closed.
5. Do your homework. If you get an interview, be sure to do your homework. I can’t stress this enough. I will ask you about our organization. I expect you to have thought about my job enough to know basically who we are and what we do. And I expect you to have questions for me about it. And not just generic “what’s your management style” questions. Ask me about what research we have funded lately or how things really work or what I like about my job. Or whatever. I need to know you want MY job, not a job.
6.   Think before you post. When I was young and not making the best choices, only my friends knew. With social media, now everyone has the potential to know. And while I may not be in my 20s any more, I use social media too, and I usually do look people up at some point in the process, just to see what’s out there.

And just so you know, when I look at a resume, I am interested in committees you are on, your leadership roles outside of work, international travel, languages, honors and awards and/or other things that show me that you achieve beyond your day job. Don’t waste a lot of resume space on non-work related things, but people who achieve outside of the workplace usually do really well within a workplace.

Three Reasons to Work in Water

We’ve spent a lot of time on Illinois Water talking about different types of water-related jobs, but we’ve never addressed why water careers are worth knowing about. Here are three reasons why water jobs just might deserve your attention.

1. There’s something for everyone

In covering water-related careers, Science wrote that the “opportunities are endless—it's almost a frontier mentality." And, indeed, in our WaterJobs series we’ve interviewed a biologist, professor, planner, engineer, modeler, and developer, and all these people work in water. While that’s only six, you should see our list of proposed interviewees. Water touches everyone and everything in some way or another. And, with a growing human population and increasing demand for freshwater in a developing world, there may be future requirements for water jobs that don’t even exist today.  

2. It’s stable employment (probably)

As long as you’re not planning to swim with the dolphins, you have a good shot at landing an engaging and well-paying job, even without a bachlor’s degree.

Consider these numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics:

• Demand for Environmental Engineers is expected to grow by 22% from 2010 to 2020
• Demand for Environmental Engineering Technicians (requiring an Associate’s degree) is expected to grow 24% over that same time.
• Biochemists are expecting 31% growth
• And demand for Environmental Science Technicians (also Associate’s) is expected to increase 24%

Positions for environmental scientists, landscape architects, and hydrologists are expected to grow at an average rate (between 16 and 19%) over the next ten years. However, there is one downside in this rosy outlook: conservation biology positions are not growing. It’s always been difficult to work with animals, and the Recession and a decrease in government funding for research has made it more difficult, not just in the United States, but all over the world. While those jobs do exist, they require a lot of hard work, persistence, and volunteer hours to obtain.

One of the reasons some of these fields are seeing stable or above average job growth is rapidly approaching retirement of the baby boomer generation. Engineering firm Brown and Caldwell has developed intern programs to help address their anticipated labor shortages and recorded their experiences here.

3. It matters

The U.S. National Intelligence has identified water access as a major source of potential conflict around the world and a consequent security threat to the United States. While we might not go to war over water in the United States, American water disputes have already caused some acrimonious lawsuits among southwestern states, and Illinois’ reversal of the Chicago River has Michigan pointing fingers in our direction as Great Lakes levels drop. Add to this situation a badly aging infrastructure, including dangerous old dams that need removal, the threat of Asian carp invading the Great Lakes, the Mississippi earning a number three spot on the Weather Channel’s list of most polluted rivers in the world, and UN estimates that nearly 3.4 million people a year die from lack of clean water and it’s not hard to see that water is a field in need of  innovation and lots of hard work.  

In discussing his career, one of our WaterJobs interviewees Rick Manner said that “working for the environment is giving back to society.” If you feel contributing to your community (and the world) is important in your career path, working in water is one of the most practical ways you can make a difference. 

What is a Water Center?

So what is a water center, anyway?

IWRC is part of the National Institute of Water Resources, which is made of 54 water centers in all 50 states and US territories. Water centers are typically run out of land grant universities and are usually headed by faculty at that university. The water centers were founded in 1964 by the U.S. Congress to address the growing need for water research and development in the United States. Keep in mind that this was well before the Clean Water Act and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, so this left the U.S. Geological Survey all alone to do the nation’s water research and monitoring. Consequently, the water centers were a shiny new research effort that were addressing the big problems of the day, like how to clean up water pollution (take a look at our archives to see the breadth of the projects IWRC supported in the early days).

Water centers came under the direction of USGS in the 1980s and continue to receive some federal support to maintain a federal-state partnership. We here in Illinois are run out the same office (and staff) as the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, which means we get to enjoy great collaborations on research without having to leave our office.   

What does a water center do?

The water centers are intended to increase water knowledge and help young scientists and engineers enter water-focused careers. While this varies from center to center, one thing we all do is provide a small grants program out of our base funds. IWRC has titled this program Annual Small Grants, and these grants have resulted in some very interesting projects. Additionally, all water centers provide researchers in their state access to larger grants through the National Competitive Grants program run by the USGS. While the Sequester resulted in no National Competitive Grant awards this year, IWRC has sponsored many funded projects in the past.   

So is IWRC only interested in research?

Besides research funding, IWRC performs outreach and education and liaises with national organizations on Illinois’ behalf. Every two years, we host an Illinois Water conference, which allows anyone interested in water from around the state to present research, share ideas, and make connections. We also host the Private Well Class, which helps well owners safely manage their water supplies, and SmallWaterSupply.org, which provides reliable information for small municipal and tribal water suppliers.

Some new outreach we’ve done this year include planning a drought workshop as part of a professor’s outreach requirements in his grant and some classroom visits to discuss stormwater and recycling. We’ve also sought to make this blog and our twitter feeds a constant source of information and news about Illinois’ water resources and opportunities. If you have ideas of projects we could help you with or have an item you’d like us to highlight, please contact us. We love to hear the water news in Illinois, and we really love to share it.