Welcome and thank you for joining me on this adventure. For the newbies, you can catch up on previous posts: first blog post, second blog post here, third blog post here, fourth blog post here, fifth post here, sixth post here, seventh post here, eighth post here, the ninth post here, tenth post here, eleventh post here, twelfth post here, thirteenth post, fourteenth post here, fifteenth post, sixteenth post and seventeenth post here

I’ve got news for you in case you were wondering what became of the rebuttal (deadline). Thankfully, I managed to finetune the rebuttal and submit on time. Some people asked me if I was happy with the rebuttal I wrote. My answer has been – “it was good enough”. It was the best I could do given the specific (time and word count) circumstances I found myself it. Every piece of writing, I’ve come to learn, is a product of its time and context. After submitting the rebuttal, I was waiting for an NWO confirmation about whether it’s admissible or not. I panicked a bit and send an email inquiry. It turns out that they don’t routinely send out confirmation about admissibility of rebuttals unless there were corrections to be made. So now all my files – full proposal, referees’ reports and my rebuttal – have been sent to the assessment committee who will review everything in preparation for the interview stage.

In other news, I received an email confirmation about the scheduled date for my interview with the assessment committee. On Friday 4 September 2026, 11.20, I will get the opportunity to present for 5 minutes and take a 15 minutes Q&A. The interview will take place in person at the NWO office in Utrecht. This will be the first time that I have to do a grant interview in person. My NWO Veni Grant 2020 and ERC Starting Grant 2024 interviews were both online. I’m curious and excited to experience this in-person grant interview for the first time. The set up is that there will be 12 panel members (including the technical chair) in the room on the day of the interview. Of course not all of them will ask me questions. Based on my (previous) experience, there will be about 4 of them (with close affinity to my discipline/research topic) will be assigned to lead the Q&A. The names of panel members are given which helps me to look them up, take an educated guess as to who might be leading my Q&A and have a mental (visual) image of the people I will be meeting in that interview room.

The interview invitation letter had some details that made for some ‘grim’ reading. Here is that line:

The committee has invited 20 applicants for an interview. About 7 proposals can be awarded funding in this round.

I became a bit despondent for the first few hours after reading it. It was a bit of a mental gymnastics going through multiple mindset (framing) about the process. I went from thinking, “maybe it’s not worth it”, to “I don’t know if I really want this”, to “what are the odds that I get this” to “how much more effort (in relation to potential outcome) should i stil put into this”. Honestly, the imposter syndrome came pouring on me like a cold bath on a hot heatwave afternoon. I had to ride through the various emotions until I arrived at the current mindset that “the research is important and that I’m gonna give my absolute best for this final phase of the interview in this long grant process”. I didn’t come this far to give up so easily. Whatever the outcome, I want to look back on this process and confidently say that I did my utmost best and there was nothing more I could have done.

I was reminded of the pre-proposal stage where I only got through by the skin of my teeth and thanks to standard deviation. Who knows maybe I get another second chance like this at the interview stage…

Given that time and chance sometimes come to those well prepared, I’m just gonna focus on having some summer holidays rest and then preparing well for the interview. This is all I can do for now so let’s see how it goes….