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The €10k application cost should change the advice from “polish harder” to “check the base rate”: ask how many proposals this host submitted and funded in the last MSCA round.

There's also a bunch of prisoner dilemma in here... It's best if everybody decides to only do minimal polishing. Ideally there would be a rule against overly polishing 😅

Application time probably varies from 2 weeks to 3 months; the average might be more like 1 month? The cost of a PhD also varies wildly I assume; applying is more beneficial is cheaper countries. This also ignores the overhead of support staff and training programs.

Another caveat: Encouraging students to think about future research plans is not really wasted money. But I must say that MSCA has a lot of "process" and "meta" around it that takes a lot of time to get right that at least to me feels quite redundant and not reusable.

Roby Bhattacharyya

@roby-b.bsky.social

then there's review...

cacm.acm.orgFunding Successful Research – Communications of the ACM

Oh god ...

That's a fun observation, and applies in general to early-career researchers: Significant portion of your productivity is used towards applying for grants/positions. One proposed solution to this is result-based funding: cacm.acm.org/opinion/fund...

Yeah I've been thinking the same: say you get 3-5 years PhD "for free" and then repeatedly get the next 3 years of funding based on the past 3 years. This of course has the major drawback (as does the current system) that success of your PhD is amplified massively to success of your career...