I’m currently in an in-between state of sorts, waiting to start part two of my summer holiday. One might think that after my action-packed New Zealand adventure the prospect of spending two weeks in Finland would seem rather dull, but as a matter of fact I welcome it wholeheartedly and would gladly extend my stay by another week. However, I also want to spend a decent amount of time back home around Christmas and New Year, so it all comes down to priorities again. At least I’m fairly sure that unlike last summer, this time my vacation won’t be interrupted by a panic involving overdue deliverables, since there are none left to submit until the very end of the project.

When I return to Dublin, it will mark the beginning of the last six months of my two-year fellowship, which I must admit is a slightly terrifying thought. However, the way things are going at the moment is fairly encouraging, with one paper published and the camera-ready version of another one submitted during the past month. Still, I can’t afford to have any illusions regarding the amount of effort it’s going to take to wrap this thing up neatly by the end of January 2020 – I still have the most critical part of the research ahead of me, and I expect it’s not going to be smooth sailing all the way even if there are no actual major setbacks.

Of course I can’t just set the horizon at the end of the fellowship and pretend that there’s nothing beyond it; as tempting as the idea may sometimes seem, there’s no realistic scenario where I’m going to retire at the age of 40, so I need to think about continuity. The basic plan is the same that it’s been all this time – go back to my old research group, at least for a while, assuming that they’re still willing to have me – but the big question, as always, is where the money for my salary is going to come from. In the best case there will be enough short-term funding to see me through to the end of next year, which would provide a nice soft landing but still wouldn’t move the horizon a whole lot further away.

One opportunity I guess I’ll have to take a stab at is the September call of the Academy of Finland, specifically the Academy Research Fellow funding instrument. This would keep me going for another five years, which sounds almost too good to be true, and indeed it more or less is, considering how fierce the competition is. The success rate for these proposals is around ten percent, making the instrument even more competitive than the MSCA Individual Fellowship, where the percentage is around fifteen. It is, of course, encouraging that I did manage to get the MSCA IF, but my past experiences with the AoF have not been so uplifting, so I’m not sure how much I ought to fancy my chances here.

Still, on the whole it looks like this is worth a shot, because I do have a number of things I can build upon as a result of the time I’ve spent here at DCU. These include the concrete results of my research, of course, but also the new skills I’ve learned and the new connections I’ve made. The experience I now have of what makes a successful proposal should also prove valuable, as should the experience of working abroad – in fact, had I stayed at my alma mater, I wouldn’t even be eligible to apply, but thanks to the fellowship, I now pass the Academy’s mobility criterion with flying colours, which is a big part of why I came to Ireland in the first place.

None of this matters, of course, unless I can put together a convincing research plan, and to do that, I first of all need to decide what it is that I want to do research on. Obviously it will be connected to what I’ve been working on in Dublin, but it’s a broad area and there are many different angles from which I could approach it in my future work, so I need to ask myself a couple of questions. One of these is, what would I be really, really interested in doing? Five years is quite a long time to be working on something that you find you’re not that into after all, and it’s hardly a recipe for success in a job that’s pretty much built on the assumption that you’re doing it because you enjoy the challenge and are genuinely curious about what you’re going to discover.

Thankfully, by this point in my life I think I can say I know myself pretty well and have a good idea of the sorts of challenges that will keep me from getting bored. That leaves the other question: what can I successfully argue to the reviewers of my proposal that I am the right guy to attempt? If I’m very lucky, when I draw that Venn diagram it will turn out that the intersection of those two sets contains enough substance to shape a funding-worthy proposal out of, but it’s not exactly a rock solid foundation for my future plans, so I’m going to have to do some hedging of bets. If you have or know a company that could use a creative and computationally minded individual for cool R&D projects, I’d love to hear about it!