Recent months have been some of the most rewarding personally I have had in my life, and some of the most frustrating and difficult professionally. My son was born last year in September, and is approaching 10 months of age at the time of writing. He, my wife, and myself are all quite healthy and happy despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, along with our extended families in Croatia and the US. Since November of last year I have been unemployed, which was at first and continues to be a blessing. But all options I had for a job to start this Fall have fallen through. So at the moment I have no prospects for a job in the near future, especially within academic research where I have been hoping.
Of course this isn't supposed to be a "wah wah look at me" type of thing - as I said we are healthy, I have a little boy to entertain every day, and luckily me being out of work is not a financial burden at the moment. But of the course the way our brains work is that we are always asking ourselves what could have been and what could be better, and uncertainty itself is difficult to deal with.
So, what happened? I chose to leave work outside of Paris so that we could all move back to Brussels together early, to settle in and prepare for my wife starting work there in any case this Spring. I was on good terms with my boss, he had funding for at least another 6 months, and we had ongoing ideas, but it just made so much sense for a hundred reasons to go back to Brussels. So the first thing I need to remember is that this was at least partially a choice, and one that I would definitely make again.
Before leaving Paris I had already made contacts in Brussels at the French-speaking university in Brussels. I had met them and had a good relationship with one professor. We agreed to write proposals together for me to start a PostDoc with them in mid-2020. Unfortunately the situation at many universities in Belgium is that they have no funding themselves for hiring PostDocs (neither institutional nor individual grants), so many people have to rely on third-party funding sources. Fortunately, however, I was eligible for three different funding sources and we agreed to write proposals for all three. I figured it made sense to write a really good proposal and send roughly the same thing to all three calls than to diversify, and of course the professor agreed.
By early 2020 all three had been submitted, but in February I was already rejected from the first and most competitive grant - the Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship. I knew that this was very competitive (success rate ~12% in my area) so I was not very disappointed and in any case I had two remaining applications to slightly less competitive grants that would not be decided on until the summer. So I mostly just forgot about it. But, my score from the reviewers was not just below the threshold for being funded, but it was quite low. There unfortunately wasn't a big detailed report, so I just figured that it was super competitive and went on. In the back of my mind though, I was concerned that if I scored poorly here it would be the same on the other proposals.
Fast-forward to May, the coronavirus is in peak in Europe and we are still mostly in lockdown in Belgium. The results from the second proposal are delayed more than a month. But finally in early June I get the second rejection. This one has a nicely detailed report - one reviewer likes it very much, one likes it but has some reservations, and one actively doesn't like it - so we get an average score that is a bit low and don't get the funding (success rate for this one is ~20%). I'm disappointed, definitely, but I still have one more proposal to hope for, and the last one is supposed to be the least competitive.
At the end of June I get the results from the final proposal and it is also a rejection. But this one is more confusing. I read the detailed reports, and although one is a little negative, three other reports are glowingly positive and unreservedly recommend funding. There is a summary from the panel that reviews the reports to make sure everything is in order, and they are also only positive, strongly recommend funding, and give my proposal a grade of "Excellent". But the final decision is not to fund based on "lack of financial resources." I was shocked, not only because I failed on my last chance for 2020, but I can't tell why. Of course in every grant competition everywhere the proposals that aren't funded are rejected because there isn't enough money, but there needs to be a reason why some proposals were chosen instead of other ones. This is especially true when a proposal is graded as excellent. I wrote to the committee about why this does not make sense, and I got a very polite but also generic answer. But the reality was better portrayed by the professor I was hoping to work for - they simply don't have enough money to fund all good proposals, and they know they are throwing great candidates in the trash. Oooff...
After calming down a bit - going for a bike ride, drinking some nice Belgian beer - there was a lot to unpack and a lot to learn from this (despite the inherent unfairness of the process).
The reviewers were overall quite good. With a total of three applications sent of almost the same proposal, I had 10 expert reviewers look at it and make comments. Yes, some seemed to not understand fully what I was proposing to do, and some were clearly biased on one method or annoyed that I didn't cite a certain colleague. But overall they were quite fair and knowledgeable, and in the end if they don't understand what I propose I must take that to mean that I didn't explain it well. But the greater implication of this is even more hard to admit.
I didn't write a good proposal. Yes, this sucks, but it is better to admit it right away. I need to take their comments, regardless of how it can hurt my ego, and learn how I can make it better. Besides the science and the writing, which is what I am focusing on now, there were a few other facts that I needed to realize.
I was arrogant. I am sure that I believed that my CV and recent large number of publications would carry the proposal. This was stupid. Even if reviewers think my CV is good, they are still required to score my proposal based on the science and the planning in fully independent sections. So the CV just cannot be something I depend on,
All of the grants were competitive. I understood which was more competitive and which was least competitive, but I used this to distract myself from writing the best proposal possible. In the end the most competitive funded roughly 12% of applicants and the least competitive roughly 20-25%. So even the least competitive grant is still funding a minority of the proposals they receive.
I am fighting for every point. Not realizing the above points, I was lazy about things that I didn't think were important. Or I rationalized that it didn't need to be perfect. The reality is, if I think something can be improved then I should improve it, regardless of how small.
I should have leveraged my network. I didn't ask anyone I know to look at the proposal in depth. Some of my past supervisors I'm sure would have, and even showing it to a colleague or two would have resulted in helpful points and self-reflection.
It has surely become clear that I intend on trying again to get a PostDoc in Belgium. Luckily I am still eligible for all three grants for this coming application cycle, so I will apply for a PostDoc to start mid-2021. I have already done a detailed revamping of the proposal and have three people looking at it at this moment. Here's hoping the next weeks are productive and I come out with something better.
In the meantime though, I am still stuck. Even assuming I do get funding for 2021, it is mid 2020 and I'm looking for at least a year-long position somewhere. This is such a balancing act, and is also very unfamiliar territory for me.
Do I try to find a position related to what my research was on? If so, then there are very few places in Belgium and they don't come around often, so I might be constraining my search too much. Do I expand to areas that I have thought about as possible career changes? Data science, machine learning, climate science, solar cells, etc, etc.? I could, but if I do commit to something like that it might be a death sentence for my research career. And even if I did want to change my career, do I have the specific skills? Or would they find me generally overqualified? How much of a commute am I willing to have? I've looked in pretty much all of Belgium, but also Aachen, Germany, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and Lille, France. Are there remote possibilities? Maybe I can contact a research group that I really match well and propose to work with them remotely. But is this even a thing? Would anybody be up for it?
So, this is where I am now. I'm applying for 2021 grants and looking for something to start now. But I find myself conflicted. I find that for available research positions I tend to not have the specific experience they are looking for and they usually have someone else in mind already anyway. For engineering positions they tend to think I am overqualified since I have done a PostDoc already in France. So based on the feedback of the job market I haven't yet found a niche. Of course, I have only been looking for a few months and the coronavirus is making it hard for everyone.
I seem to be and I hope to be in the eye of the storm. After the summer holidays I will pick up my search, and I hope that recruiters and managers will do the same. Managers should have a better idea what resources they have for the rest of 2020, hopefully the coranavirus situation is improving, and everyone will be back working in full force for la rentrée. But man, waiting is tough.
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