My exciting EPSRC first grant!

When I moved to Loughborough in February, I got one of the best gifts possible. In my first week here, I got the news that I had been awarded an EPSRC first grant. I had applied the grant while I was at Queen’s University Belfast – in fact, physically, I was in an AirBnB rental in Coycocan, Mexico city (as a visitor to UNAM for a Newton fund grant) when I had sent in the application. It was a stressful process, a stressful about three years procrastinating and agonising over the content and language. The primary reason being that you have only one shot at the ‘first grant’.

Anyways, it came through (hurrah!). Once you have been through one of these submissions, you discover this amazing maze of systems that bestow upon you the resources to help you conduct research!! You get to add a number of new keywords to your dictionary.

In brief, what happens is that you submit your application on the Je-S system with a number of documents after you have agonised, procrastinated, discussed, debated, tried to get industry support (or decide not to get, as in my case), written, re-written, accidentally deleted the whole application (as in my case on the eve of submission), got the application re-instated by calling somebody in charge etc etc… Then, the documents (and by extension, your career) passes through the hands of expert reviewers whose advice goes before a panel (which meet a few times a year). One fine (or horrible) day all is revealed – as in my case in the EPSRC ICT Prioritastion panel Jan 2017. As one can see, there are a number of different grants considered – the first grant seems to have a better chance being of relatively smaller value and of lower expectations than, say, the standard grants. In my panel, it seems 6 out of the 7 first grant applicants made it while only 4 out of 12 standard grants did. Sometimes, it can be far worse!

At the end of it all, Research Council UK (RCUK)’s nice sounding Gateway to Research  gives you a listing as a Principal Investigator and your successful project gets its own page and its own life! – Well, the real life for my project begins from July 1st when the money comes in and the expectations begin.