31 MG: are info sessions enough you think? LG: We could even go a bit further. Everybody that is 2 or 3 years into their postdocs should be maybe be getting an email saying they are at a stage they could start thinking about this. Or their PIs could be informed they should encourage this. Departmental chairs should push this a bit more. Writing grants is something you can learn. ERC is doing a lot of internal data analysis and they have shown that if you apply, you have - on average - a 10% chance but if you reapply the next time even If you didn’t get it the first time, you have a 15% chance because you improve and you get feedback. In the first round you get at least 3 reviews but in the second round, you have 8 to 11 reviewers that have given an opinion on your work. This high number means the actual reviews can go from black to white and everything in between but it also helps you to write your grant in such a way that everybody can understand what it is that you are writing. MG: Do we have to assist young scientists? Is there some advice to give the university or young PIs on how to improve these skills? LG: I think the central services at the University could do more in providing these courses - or increase the visibility of the ones they provide. In Oxford, they had a lot of career development courses. They had a career center and a lot of info sessions on time management, team building, career management etc. They even had an EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) mock panel which is the equivalent of an FNRS evaluation mock panel. I participated in that mock panel and found It extremely useful because it opened my eyes to the fact that even though I was not an expert in all of the topics of these grants, in the end we did come to a ranking that was very close to the original ranking of the panel itself. So you get a feeling of what people think is important in the evaluation of projects and it makes you a better project writer as well. There are a number of other initiatives that people could take. It is important to make scientists aware that if you want to stay in science, it is not only about just the work that you do but also everything else, the other skills that you need to develop, especially the soft skills. In my experience, people that have gotten an ERC are very much willing to pay it forward. They also get the explicit request from ERC to be an ambassador for ERC. The first grant that I wrote had a structure that was coming from another grant that was a collaboration between Liege and Leuven on African river research. It had nothing to do with my field but I read the project and I liked the structure so much that I have been using it ever since. Other colleagues have also started using it with success. I do love to talk about it and give advice on what I have learned. I have now seen it from so many different angles that I know there are some things that can really make a difference in getting the grant or at least getting your point across - though it also depends on the reviewers and the other applicants of course. «ERC is a good way to just think about what you want to do the next 5 years, what is the big thing that you want to achieve and write it down. It is 15 pages, it Is not a dramatic amount and it is very much focused on the science and methodology» «It is important to make scientists aware that if you want to stay in science, it is not only about just the work that you do but also everything else, the other skills that you need to develop, especially the soft skills»
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