Sick at home. It's nice, I needed a break from the outside world.

Crazy when being sick is a break

Work was rough man. Workplace already had some drama for the past month or two, several people on the team left, and I think the fact that I recently got rejected for a fellowship application (a very prestigious one that I didn't think I'd get, but still) made something crack in me... So I'm back on the job market yay (not expecting to get anything anytime soon)

In any case, I am sufficiently recovered from the flu that I can do normal stuff and enjoy life again

Oh man, getting those rejections just suck. Where you hoping to leverage that to get away from job?

My week has been good, the team I obsess over in the niche sport I also obsess about won, so that is good.

I got a new office at work. It is smaller than the one I had but it is a lot nicer and in a quieter location. One of my big projects got past a major hurdle so that is good.

The Arctic Vortex is subsiding, so the ice is melting.

I started a replay of Horizon Zero Dawn, so that is fun.

I went to Paris to go to the Musée d' Orsay.

I spent all my time in my pokey little hotel room with food poisoning instead 🫩.

So the fellowship in question essentially allows people to get paid from the EU to "create their own job" and work on their projects of interest. The program I applied to is highly selective and provides 2-2.5 years of stable, contracted employment at above market-rate salary, which is quite hard to come by in academia (but that's a much longer story)... As an example, my current role is on a 1-year renewable contract, meaning in a bad-case scenario, my boss can theoretically "fire" me any time they want (this is in a country where most jobs are permanent contract & it is otherwise very difficult to fire someone btw). Does wonders to job security...

About the program itself... So Horizon Europe is the main scientific funding body in the EU/EEA area. They run several programs which are aimed at promoting "mobilization", meaning researchers who relocate to a different country to work and learn new things. I applied to one of those programs in summer 2025 since I relocated to the EU and was eligible. My boss and I knew we were short on time and didn't expect a miracle, but we still had some hope... But this year the program was particularly tough: +60-70% application numbers, they didn't track but strong suspicion a lot of those were from the US, and there are strong unofficial speculations that applicants and reviewers were mass-using ChatGPT and other LLMs for proposal writing. I'm just salty because I bombed the application... but a lot of people were genuinely mad because they wrote winning proposals but didn't win the "lottery". Fun fact but this was posted on c/europe four months ago: https://lemmy.world/post/36718694

Oh wow, that sounds incredible!!!

Sorry you didn’t get it.

This is actually my second ever comment on Piefed. I'm gradually trying to spend a bit less time on the big centralised social media hubs - I'd like to be less dependent on places like Discord, Reddit, Twitter. So I've joined Mastodon, Piefed, and Matrix. It feels liberating, brings back fond memories of the small web before big social media giants took over.

As for my news this week, I'm entering my second week of a new medication for my anxiety and depression. It's a bit early to say but I've seen some early positive signs that it might be helping, so fingers crossed.