Making SOS-TIPS happen

Navigating the world of grant writing and implementation can be very disorienting, especially if you have little experience or feel less scaffolded where you are now, and are looking to build infrastructure around you as well as gain expertise. I'm from Hungary, which, we like to say is "Central-Eastern Europe"; it's an EU member state, but is categorized by the EU as a "low research and innovation" or "widening" country (read more about this here). This doesn't mean there aren't great innovations and solid research being conducted in Hungary, there no doubt are. This is a way to describe a kind of academic isolation and/or inequality that clearly exists among countries within the EU and around the world. Although this is a complex subject and deserves more space to discuss, I'd like to lean on this idea when trying to convey why I've started this blog.

Many things can isolate or hinder PhD students and early career researchers, such as social anxiety in foreign academic circles, the language barrier, fear of feedback, lacking experience in collaboration, as well as not being exposed to international discourse in their subject and so on. I have some experience: I've attained a PhD, I've been teaching in higher ed since 2014, I've won several scholarships, including a Fulbright...but I would not classify myself as "experienced". And being from a widening country, I'm in a position to see some struggles that are unique to us and some challenges that need to be addressed by academia as a whole.

Grounded in my very personal experience with the project I am about to embark on, I'd like to share my thoughts and insights on challenges I will no doubt face in the coming three years. My hope is that the straightforward disclosure of my hardships and successes will help others who want to apply for a Marie Curie or other type of fellowship. The topics I will discuss and the angle that I will take in all this is most relevant to social scientists, and many issues will be specific to my venture that entails an "outgoing phase" of the project in the USA, and an "incoming phase" in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, I hope people will find it useful, whatever their endeavor may be.

 The structure of this blog

The blog will follow the general structure of my project in terms of its Work Packages (WPs); see project overview here. These will constitute subpages in the blog, which will contain various blog entries added over time. I will cross-reference stuff if I see some useful connections. Dates ("section added: ....") mean nothing, they just look informative.