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Friends and colleagues can be crucial allies on bids

After a delayed start in 2021 while details of Horizon Europe were wrangled over, the European Research Council is back up to speed with its funding calls. The first deadline is for Starting Grants on 8 April, with up to €1.5 million over five years on offer to researchers with between two and seven years’ research experience after their PhD.

Competition is always fierce, with a success rate of just 13.3 per cent in 2020, and grantee lists tend to be dominated by researchers in wealthier countries with more advanced research systems. Romania, for example, has had only six winners of ERC Starting Grants. One of these is Alexandra Baneu from Babeș-Bolyai University, who won a €1.2m grant in 2020 to look at academic dissemination in medieval Europe.

With less university support available to her than to many western European applicants, Baneu had to lean heavily on her friends and colleagues for advice, but that worked out just fine for her.

What is your project?

We are collecting the notebooks of medieval theology students from the 14th to the 15th century and organising them into a corpus to see how academic practices were reflected in those notebooks. Nobody had thought to use notebooks as a category of study for the Middle Ages.

Where are the notebooks from?

They’re stored in libraries throughout Europe. We have some of them in Paris, some of them in Cologne and some of them in Romania—they are kind of everywhere.

How long did the application process take?

There are two aspects to the whole process. First, there is getting a good idea—and that took a lot of time. I finished my PhD in 2016 and ever since 2017 I had been thinking I would like to apply for an ERC grant. I only applied in 2019 because that’s when I got this idea about notebooks through working on other people’s projects. The second part was actually writing the proposal, and that took around six months.

How did you know that your idea was right for a Starting Grant?

I was working on a project involving a medieval notebook. I started reading and I got this idea of making a corpus out of notebooks to see what they could tell us, because I was impressed by how much that certain notebook contained about university practices in the Middle Ages. I had floated other ideas to the director of the project before that, but this time she was actually excited and said it could make a good ERC project.

Why do you think your application was successful?

First, I have a weird kind of career path, in that I had to specialise in two domains, and the ERC is really into that. And then I had a lot of help. I had my mentor, an ERC grantee, who read my proposal twice and gave me good advice. Then I had a native speaker read it, as well as one of my younger colleagues. And last but not least, I sent the first part of the proposal—the one that is meant to impress generalists—to my philosopher friends, one of whom specialises in modal logic and had a lot of things to say about my style. All those people helped.

What are your two domains of specialisation?

I specialise in medieval studies, where I have my thesis, and I also specialise in Romanian philology in the 19th century. I don’t have a thesis there, but my permanent job is in that field. It showed that I have a certain degree of flexibility and I think people look for that, especially with big projects, because you do have to be able to adapt to the circumstances of research.

Do you think success was harder for you, as a Romanian researcher, than for others?

No, it wasn’t more difficult. But while I was writing my proposal, I was thinking that I had to use my own network, my friends. In other countries, ones that get a lot of ERC grants, this whole thing is more institutionalised. We now actually have a support centre at Babeș-Bolyai University, but it’s still young.

It must have helped to have a mentor with an ERC grant.

It was extremely useful. She helped me with the presentation—helped me to word it in the right way. I think her advice was mostly stylistic in terms of mastery of the ERC jargon.

How did you work on your proposal in the final weeks before the deadline?

In the last few weeks, that’s when I had the first part of the proposal read by non-specialists. I made very important revisions in my style for the first part because I wasn’t good at talking to a non-specialist. I defined my concepts based on what my friends said they didn’t understand. So I worked on the style a lot—on making sure that somebody from another field could understand why my research was interesting. 

What would your top advice be for future applicants?

Read the guide and use the ERC’s language. Make sure your idea is really good—discuss it with your colleagues, get counterarguments and respond to the counterarguments while you’re writing your proposal, imagining what points could be attacked. 

This is an extract from an article in Research Professional’s Funding Insight service. To subscribe contact sales@researchresearch.com