Casual Conversation

So the fellowship in question essentially allows people to get paid from the EU to "create their own job" and work on their projects of interest. The program I applied to is highly selective and provides 2-2.5 years of stable, contracted employment at above market-rate salary, which is quite hard to come by in academia (but that's a much longer story)... As an example, my current role is on a 1-year renewable contract, meaning in a bad-case scenario, my boss can theoretically "fire" me any time they want (this is in a country where most jobs are permanent contract & it is otherwise very difficult to fire someone btw). Does wonders to job security...

About the program itself... So Horizon Europe is the main scientific funding body in the EU/EEA area. They run several programs which are aimed at promoting "mobilization", meaning researchers who relocate to a different country to work and learn new things. I applied to one of those programs in summer 2025 since I relocated to the EU and was eligible. My boss and I knew we were short on time and didn't expect a miracle, but we still had some hope... But this year the program was particularly tough: +60-70% application numbers, they didn't track but strong suspicion a lot of those were from the US, and there are strong unofficial speculations that applicants and reviewers were mass-using ChatGPT and other LLMs for proposal writing. I'm just salty because I bombed the application... but a lot of people were genuinely mad because they wrote winning proposals but didn't win the "lottery". Fun fact but this was posted on c/europe four months ago: https://lemmy.world/post/36718694