For 2 years I've been planning to apply for the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, a grant you can only apply for within 7 years after your PhD. If you get this grant, you start your lab, you are famous, you buy whatever reagent you need for your experimens, you touch the sky basically. The success rate is around 10%, which means that 1 in 10 can get it or that you have to apply 10 times to get it (which of course is not possible). The success rate is low, but given the amount of money involved (1.5 million of euros for 5 years), you play the game.
This year, applicants working in the US receive half million more. I am in the US and I could benefit from that. I joined a good lab, have an article in the works and another soon-to-be-published from my work in Italy, not bad. This year, the main part of the proposal was reduced from 14 to 7 pages. I already created a figure to illustrate the projects and techniques I would use in my lab. Everything looked promising. But I DNF.
The reasons I DNF:
I couldn't make it.
The reasons I couldn't make it:
Well, you can always find reasons to explain why you haven't done something.
DNF means "Did Not Finish" in ultra running races.
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| by semi-rad |
I build my life around challenges, professional, athletic, personal ones. I love trying to be the best, my best. I love pushing and I perform well under pressure. I also know I can collapse when the demands are excessively high, when clearly I, or someone else, set unrealistic goals for me. This time I Did Not Finish. The situation was so overwhelming that it exceeded my control. Every day I woke up thinking "today is the day, today I write the project". Family visit, bathroom renovation, visa renewal... Every single day, it seemed that I had a new fire to extinguish. I feel very very exhausted and I feel a deep depression with anxiety crises that peak every 3-4 days. Add frustration and dissociation from my body and you get an explosive cocktail.
On Saturday, one month and a half before the ERC-StG deadline, I officially declared DNF. It was rather the ERC-StG that DNF me actually. Fortunately, my mother said: "Juli, no hagas lo que no querés hacer". And I realized that I do want to apply for the ERC StG but that I was actually already months and months behind. It was during a run that I had the vision. I was on my favourite route from home around Sanitas, which has a beautiful single downhill track in the forest. I was running and I accepted that the time was gone, that I DNF for the first time a grant application.
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| View from Sanitas summit |
I have to say that I don't feel proud of me. But at least I can leave this frustrating place and move forward with a new plan.