Two months ago I had my 1st anniversary as FWO PostDoc fellow here at TEREC and while writing my annual report, I realized that I spend the first six months intensely thinking about and working on grants that will provide the operational money we need to deliver and even expand the proposed goals during my first three years as a PostDoc.
As you might already know, we want to study these little yellow fluffballs to get insights into avian evolution and how rapidly changing environments drive speciation. And how could this be quantified better than by using genomic tools? Yet, while prices are dropping, genomic work still calls for a lot of money.
Genomics –> Money –> Grant –> ?
Yet, while thinking that we wrote two very solid proposals (one Research Project and one Research Grant) you never know what will happen. After all, the released success rates propose a one in five chance of being among the lucky ones.
It took us another 6+ months of nervously waiting – only interrupted by a request for delivering more reviewers (obviously 10 weren‘t enough which makes us even more restless) – before the news finally came in: ACCEPTED aaaannndd… ACCEPTED !!
We still can’t believe our luck: the luck of winning the double but also the luck of finally start working on this exciting system with full genomic coverage!
So, if you are a student with interest in either genomics or evolutionary modeling and looking out for a PhD that include these yellow fluffballs then we are happy to hear from you!