I'm from the humanities, where research grants etc. are scarce. Also, training to deal with research grants and external funding is nearly non-existent in my field.
I'm curious as to how graduate students in more external money-heavy areas like engineering or medicine (or maybe even computer science?) learn how to manage a lab.
I saw Managing lab funds , How does laboratory funding and money management work in grad school?, and a few other posts but it still feels opaque to me how people become adept at managing research money at scale — and yet this is a really central part of the job in many fields (but as I said above — not common in mine).
Presumably a lot of that money has allocation rules, accounting rules, and can be audited to insure compliance too.
- Are there courses in graduate school?
- is it learned informally from being a postdoc?
- or does everyone take a funding management compliance course at their university?
Other questions indicate that people do have knowledge of this: Is it usually allowed to use grant money for voluntary contributions? but it’s hard to believe no one has an explanation of how they got this knowledge.