This thread is making me think about NIH program officers. As in, they email you and say, "Your project idea fits with our mission. I encourage you to submit a grant application. Let's talk next week." So you get all charged up.
Then you call. You realize very quickly that the program officer either never read that one-page summary he asked you to write and that you labored over, or he's forgotten it completely and didn't bother to re-read it. So you summarize your idea and he doesn't sound so enthusiastic anymore. But you keep talking, because you really have no choice.
At some point, you bring up something about your preliminary data, and he gets all perky again. He cheerfully tells you that "this program doesn't require preliminary data, because we're trying to fund
risky research. We're looking for groundbreaking ideas that aren't fully developed yet." So you ask about success rates for applications without preliminary data and he starts to answer sideways.
By the end of your phone call, you glumly understand that your much-anticipated conversation with this program officer has essentially been an attempt at extracting important information from someone who doesn't care about your tiny project. And you realize that he hasn't told you anything that you couldn't have read for yourself in the NIH's promotional materials (aka requests for applications and program descriptions). And then you start to realize that a lot of NIH's requests for applications seem to be rather narrowly written. And then you look at funded projects in the NIH's public database, and a lot of them are in the same general areas. So you quite reasonably start to wonder if the NIH is looking for a certain kind of "hot" project.
And honey, yours isn't it. It's not all the program manager's fault. This is what happens when success rates are around 10% (or less!), and the number of grant applications keeps climbing because there are too many people in research. It's also, IMO, it's what happens when you put the wrong kinds of people in charge of things like this.
The upshot here is that you can substitute "college admissions officer" for "NIH program officer" / "study section" and "extracurricular activity" for "project" here, and the story would be the same. Sadly, the reality is very different from what they tell you.
