Lindy Aleshire

Manager, Award Services

Research Support Office

Research Administration

Plain & Simple (ish)

1/04/2005 was the day I started working at UT. It was during winter break, so I thought people were exaggerating when they said UT had a parking problem.

I was the first hire into a newly created organized research unit in the College of Natural Sciences (CNS). I spent my first three years teaching myself research administration (pre and post award) and then spent the next 14 years honing my approach.

• There weren't any trainers, support groups, or resources available except the list of handouts the Office of Accounting had published (and still has!!) in the mid to late 1990s, as well as the occasional *Define class - the majority of the material already had significant portions of outdated information by then.  -no shade, I know it's hard to keep things updated when you're as big as we are and policy and process often feel like moving targets.
   
• Despite UT being about 150 years old at the time, the research administration landscape back in the early 2000s was frontier country for much of the University!

Because I was essentially operating as a one-person department with a lot of faculty members (up to 17 at one point) and their students, postdocs and other researchers, anything that could possibly pop up in research administration, I handled. And because CNS was administratively a very tightly run College over those years, I had a pretty high threshold to meet and maintain - which, of course, helped me a ton.

• I mostly handled proposals and award management for funding from federal agencies such as NSF, DARPA, ONR, NSA, and occasionally Sandia Labs and NASA. I also handled Packard and Sloan Foundation awards. 

Over the years, I begged, cajoled, pleaded, demanded, befriended and used the word please a lot in order to pull together how to do my job well. There were some incredibly helpful people along the way in the Office of Sponsored Projects, the Office of Accounting, Office of the Vice President for Research, Provost's Office, Travel Management Services, CNS Dean's Office, and many more who took time out of their busy schedules to help answer a question or solve a problem I hadn't encountered before. 

On a whim, back in October 2021, I decided to apply for an interesting looking position that had landed in my email --it was strictly pre-award in the College of Liberal Arts (CoLA) Office of Research, and I thought it would be fun to specialize in just that, having spent the better part of two decades as a pre and post one-stop shop. Looking back, I wasn't too serious about landing the job; I just wanted to feel it out and see if it was worth considering. (Real talk: Though I'll also admit that hearing one of my managers casually mention a re-org without any follow-up detail whatsoever did give me pause and make me wonder if I should be considering my options. It bothered me that no one thought to assure folks they'd still be emloyed at the end of it.)

The warm and personable team I interacted with during the CoLA Office of Research interviews quickly convinced me I had struck gold, so I lept, and ever since I've been grateful that the planets had aligned that day. Working in the Research Support Office has been an absolute dream and I'm fired up about my job every day. This team has given me a deeper respect for folks who specialize in pre-award and proposal services. It's an intensely deadline-driven job that stacks up differently than post-award does. I learned that I'm more suited to post-award, though I still very much enjoy helping folks go after the funding that I also help them spend!

At the risk of sounding cliché, I do genuinely enjoy helping people, making sure they have what they need to be able to do their jobs and feel good about the job they're doing.