The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

Hi All,

I currently work for the Corps of Engineers and was awarded a retention award. I have talked to a former Smart Scholar in my office who mentioned that the hours he spent on the SMART scholarship was charged somewhere between his effective salary rate and the fully burdened rate we normally charge to projects but he didn't remember the exact conversion. My resource management staff are out of the office this week and part of the next to specifically answer my questions before the acceptance packet is due.

Could any current retention scholars let me know how many hours a pay period are covered by their stipend and the benefits bonus or what multiplier is used to get from your effective salary rate to the rate that is charged to the SMART MIPR that is sent to your sponsoring facility?

Hey Mn Engineer.

I am trying to track down this information too. The SMART program says they send the stipend plus 30% for admin, which is obviously much less than our normal total labor multiplier we charge for projects. We have another SMART scholar in our office, and she said her last MIPR was $50,732.60 not including travel for a $38,000 award, which comes out to about 1.34. So that's pretty close to the 30% that SMART is using. But, she said that she thinks she charges at about a 1.6, which is maybe the best she could get out of our resource management folks. At that rate, the $36,000 award would only yield about $31,700.

I have a copy of the Facility Toolkit, but apparently I can't attach a pdf file to this post. Look me up in the global (William Veatch) and I'll email you a copy. It says that the SF should not charge a burdened rate against the MIPR, or else the scholar won't receive their full stipend. That's all well and good but I'm sure the RM folks will point to some other policy that says they have to do this or that.

The other scholar is a few years into the program and doesn't respond to email when she's in class or in the lab, so I'm waiting to hear back from her on some of these questions. If I learn more I'll let you know.