As a sort of follow-up to my past post about the academic job market, I can happily say that I have found a PostDoc position in Belgium at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Actually, I started on December 1st of last year so I have already been working for almost three months, although the Christmas holidays were in the middle. As is the case with any new job, 3 months is a very short time and I will probably look back at me now as not knowing very much. But it has been an interesting start, despite the increasingly boring and depressive state of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown in Belgium (I am working fully from home and therefore not on experiments). I still have publications trickling out from my past work and can keep of bit of connection to that strong expertise, but I'm mainly learning a new field and a new set of concepts and intuition, and I'm getting the chance to supervise students - awesome.
But, as I said also in my last post, even if everything is going great, and even soon after positive events, we tend to ask what could be better or how it could have been otherwise. This is partially due to the fact that I still have pending proposal applications that I had submitted in September of last year, and I again just received a rejection from the most competitive - the Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship. I was very proud of the proposal I sent in, I believe strongly in the science, and I was happy to see that the score improved. But still, it was an opportunity for a very prestigious grant where I would have a lot of independence. What could have been?
There is also some uncertainty, which is never easy to
deal with even if it is uncertainty for a good reason. I still have two
more pending proposals, which would involve a shift of university in
Brussels. And my current contract at VUB is not very long term, so I
will apply for more long term grants at the end of this year anyway. My
challenge is to see this uncertainty for what it is: exciting! Granted, I
would prefer to know something about the future, like whether I will
have a position in research at all in two years time. But I need to
embrace change and uncertainty and be excited about what is in front of
me.
