The September call of the Academy of Finland closed this week; I submitted my application for the Research Fellow grant, and I must admit I’m having mixed feelings about it. Obviously, I’m relieved to have finished the proposal on time and happy to have a work-free weekend ahead of me for a change, but beneath the pleasure of a well-earned rest there are definite undertones of “meh”. Considering the next stage of my career, getting the fellowship would be quite a big deal – the prospect of €5k per month for my own salary for five years plus up to €400k for research expenses is certainly nothing to sneer at – so why doesn’t it feel that way to me?

I guess part of the reason is that you always tend to feel a bit empty after finishing an effort like this, in a dull, “now what?” sort of way. There’s also the fact that I’m simply tired from the final push: it’s not easy to get excited about anything when you feel like you’ve done a week’s worth of work in half the time and then worked another half-week on top of that. Anyway, the funding decisions aren’t due until sometime next spring, so there’s hardly much point in getting excited now – not to mention that statistically, it’s not very likely that I’ll get the grant, so it’s not exactly a rock-solid foundation to base my plans for the future upon.

The slim odds are a big part of why, for quite a long time, I found it hard to drum up any sort of enthusiasm in myself for getting to work on the proposal. Of course, by putting it off I probably just managed to make my chances even slimmer – there was no time to have my application looked at by anyone else, and very little time even for myself to do any substantial rewrites. As a result of this, I don’t know if I can honestly say that I did my best, but I guess I did what I could in the time I gave myself to do it, and of course it’s always the case that you have to strike a balance between such things and everything else going on in your life.

So yeah, it all comes down to priorities ultimately: sure, the fellowship would be a really nice thing to get and I’m sure I’ll be enormously excited if I do get it, but I find that I don’t want it badly enough to have everything else I care about take a back seat for weeks on end. After all, there’s always next year, and then I’ll have a draft proposal to build on, presumably some useful feedback from the review panel, and also plenty of time to get further feedback from the people at the university whose job it is to help researchers prepare applications. Refereeing is always a bit of a crapshoot anyway, sometimes you get lucky with who’s assigned the task of judging your worthiness and sometimes you don’t.

Besides, the quality of the proposal isn’t even the most important criterion in this call – it’s the qualifications of the applicant, so there’s only so much I could have accomplished by putting more hours into perfecting the proposal. By the next call I’ll have wrapped up KDD-CHASER, which means I’ll have more preliminary results and hopefully more publications as well, so that will help with both the proposal and the qualifications. As a matter of fact I just submitted another manuscript last week, so if all goes well, I’ll get to make one more conference trip before the project is over.

Speaking of other things going on in my life, there is some interesting stuff afoot both on and off duty. In KDD-CHASER, the live trial of our software platform is now underway; deploying the platform has involved working with AWS EC2 virtual servers, which is pretty cool, since I always enjoy a chance to get my hands on technologies I haven’t previously used. Meanwhile, the DCU Campus Choir has started its autumn term, and boy, does it feel great to be singing again! This term we’re apparently doing Vivaldi’s Gloria RV 589 in its entirety, which I’m particularly excited about – it’s a beautiful piece, and also a bit of a challenge that I’m more than happy to accept. Stay tuned for concert dates!