Kaepirinha wrote: ↑Sat Jan 28, 2023 1:44 pm
I ws thinking about the real stats to get the fellowship..
My feeling is that all people that prepare the MSCA-PF works a lot to prepare it..or you think that some people submit it without a lot of work?
I know 2 guys, one in astrophysics and the other in the humanities, who only worked on the proposal 3 or 4 weeks 24/h. They were lucky enough to get funded, the latter applied a second time to the GF and got the seal of excellence. My advisor was one of the first people to get it and she also spent about a month writing it. On the other hand, another researcher in the field of Foreign Languages spent months and months in writing and got funded with the lowest score possible. Most of them had something like 5 or 6 past successful proposals as a reference, a lot of support from their host institution, and an external company to review their proposal.
I spent about a year in writing and discussing with two professors + two researchers from my host institution, one successful past applicant from my same country, two grant office people, and my proposal was also reviewed by an external company. I only had one past successful proposal in a similar field as a reference and a couple of gantt charts from different fields. I am experienced in project writing as I both submitted many Horizon 2020 collaborative proposals and I have worked as a support staff for other researchers applying to different funders.
I still think that this is not sufficient for my proposal to be successful, for exemple I recognize that the implementation part was too dense if compared to successful proposals. My CV is also not competitive as I spent a few years on maternity leave and some other years in industry, and I work in a completely different field from my PhD (as I said, my project is way too interdisciplinary), therefore I had very few publications at the time of the deadline. Also, my host institution is in my home country, as I am trying to come back home, and this is often not the best for MSCA, it could be regarded as a lack of mobility.
The good aspects of my proposal, on the other hand are that 1) my supervisors are very famous in the field (I dare to say they are the most famous around the globe) 2) my host department has a record of successful MSCA fellows 3) I developed the ethical part very well, addressing what could have been considered potential shortcomings in the metodological part 4) the subject is somehow trendy in the EU agenda and recently some EU agencies published reports on the topic.