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by _delirium
5071 days ago
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If your particular research interest involves eventually killing someone, you'll do fantastic. There are of course other sources of funding but they typically have much smaller wallets, especially the further you go on the 'for the good of humanity' scale. Unfortunately, being in the EU, I don't think changing this part fixes that many of the problems. EU grants are not about killing people, but typically about cooperation, building understanding between nations, reducing violence, integration of immigrants, that kind of thing. Goals I like more, in principle, than DARPA's. But the actual administration is if anything worse: 100-page proposals via hugely bureaucratic processes (NSF's are at least only 15 pages), unwieldy multi-country consortia, periodic mandatory status update meetings in Brussels, the works. If you can sell what you're doing within that framework and work with it, it's good, but it's still very much about being on the right track to impress the purse-string holders. |
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Tell me about it. I was 7 years in "academia" in the EU and 4 of those years was working in a FP7 (Seventh Framework Programme) project. Man, the amount of administrative baggage we have to do is amazing. "Libre research" is a myth, between monthly deliverables, 6-month review, half-way Brussels project review, you could not make a lot of research.
And then you have all the administrative controls, I kid you not, I had to log what I did every day in two places (one in EU FP7 timesheets (in Excel), and another one in my institute's own software (a terrible java program)). Sure, the upside was that I got to travel a lot (the project had about 7 participant countries).
Now I returned to the industry, I am in a company from the Silicon Valey as a "simple" software engineer (even though I have a PhD) and I could not be happier. Moreover, after a couple of months in the position I have made several contacts which are bringing new opportunities.
I am happier at my current "fast paced" job now as I was while I was in academia doing papers just trying to publish papers for the sake of it (that is how I felt).