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Comment by A_Duck | Hacker News Reader

This seems a little gloomy

In the UK at least, researchers have many options for research fellowships of 3-5 years, paid, many with total academic freedom to do whatever you like

My partner just got accepted to one after spending 3 months applying to 5 fellowships — an 8% ratio of application:research time.

In an Oxford or Cambridge college, you're working, eating and (for younger fellows) living in college with many other smart people. Sounds like a lot of cross-pollination of ideas happens there.

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> In the UK at least, researchers have many options for research fellowships of 3-5 years, paid, many with total academic freedom to do whatever you like

Perhaps in theory. But surely you're not going to get the next fellowship (or other academic role) unless you have shown some demonstrable output at the end of this one? That's still at least some level of pressure to try something safer but incremental rather than risky but potentially groundbreaking.

I mean absolutely, but I think 5 years is a good amount of time to let people noodle!

You wouldn't get 5 years to noodle -- maybe 1 or 2 at best. You're competing for your next thing against other smart folks who are going hard on maximizing publication rate and grant winning in their current thing. To continue with your riskier, bigger thinking you'd have to be ready to bet that: (i) you'll produce a highly impactful result before you start applying for your next thing and (ii) the high impactfulness of that result will be recognized in time to support your applications.

The most successful folks tend to mix talent and hard work with a bit of luck in terms of early gold striking to gain a quick boost of credibility that helps them draw other people into their fold (eg, grad students in a big lab) who can handle a lot of the metric maxxing to free up some (still not enough) time for more ambitious thinking.

In Spain, apart from the grant application, you have to write countless reports that take a lot of time, do endless bureaucracy to hire people or buy things, justify every expenditure. Probably you also need to hunt for a second simultaneous fellowship because typically they're too small to do meaningful research. And all this is on top of teaching, and endless evaluations where you need to submit various versions of your CV and supporting documentation (we often have 2-4 such evaluations a year). When all is said and done, time for actual research tends to zero. We live off PhD students who don't have to do all that.

The UK seems considerably better (much less bureaucracy and fewer hours of teaching) but still, you probably need to do reports and stuff on top of the grant applications.

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