Thoughts on winning a grant

Placeholder illustration for the GenGam project. It will be replaced soon. (C) Joleen Blom

I won a grant. The Research Council of Finland’s (RCF) 2026 Academy Research Fellowship, to be precise. For a 4-year project called ‘GenGam: Gendered Gam(bl)ing,’ starting this September 2026. Yet, I was angry, not happy.

You would think that when a scholar wins a large sum of money for their research, they would be ecstatic. When I learned about my results, I was certainly joyful at first, but admittedly, that happiness was almost immediately followed by anger. There are reasons for this feeling. In 2025, I had grown incredibly frustrated with the system at my faculty that often diminished its employees' contributions by, for example, withholding financial compensation for completed work beyond our contracts or treating applicants poorly during a job application process. Many of my colleagues and myself also experienced high levels of stress that year as our fixed-term contracts were ending without renewal. Tensions were high. My frustration led me to be secretive about my grant writing. While I was not keeping it a secret that I was writing one, I only informed those I trusted and those who needed to know. I kept my distance from any peer and faculty grant support.

Like any other university, Finnish universities have been undergoing an increase in corporatization over the past decades. Most research at Finnish universities is funded through external research funding. These funding opportunities are often short-term and nowadays focused on business. Most researchers are on fixed-term contracts, usually no longer than two years. The decline of resources and permanent job positions combined with a need for increased productivity has led to faculties and departments pressuring scholars to apply for more and more external funding. Budget cuts from the past two years have made this pressure even more visible.

I am not permanently employed. At the end of 2025, the CoE GameCult project that paid my salary at the faculty was about to end, along with all my CoE GameCult colleagues’ fixed-term contracts. Despite my best efforts, I had no other jobs lined up as the increasing budget cuts in higher education has reduced the number of research jobs globally available. For example, the governmental budget cuts from a few years ago in higher education in the Netherlands (where I am from) effectively created a hiring freeze across the entirety of Dutch academia. Luckily, the CoE GameCult’s exit strategy had budgeted for a few postdoctoral researchers to be hired after the project had ended. These postdocs were meant to acquire external funding when they got hired. Many researchers, including myself, applied for this position. I was one of the very few who managed to obtain a new postdoctoral contract this way, but many of my coworkers were not so lucky.

The huge employment instability in academia means that many junior and early career researchers experience high levels of stress. Even if we are employed, we usually do not know if we will still be employed the next year. Even though I have been doing well for myself, I too have been experiencing high levels of stress over the course of a few years. I developed several stress-related symptoms that I still struggle with. One of my biggest mental job hurdles had become the never-ending cycle of writing grant proposals that determined whether I would have a job or not. Often, I felt like I was stuck wasting my time writing grant proposal that would never be funded.

It may seem that I have solved my employment instability for now. I am certainly less stressed about my imminent job situation. But this peace is only temporary. Even with the acquisition of funding for the GenGam project, I will not be permanently employed in Finland. I also cannot leave Finland without losing the project as the funding comes from Finland. However, once the GenGam project ends in four years, so will my work contract. My employment chances have risen, but who knows what academia will look like in four years. It might be better, but it might also be way, way worse.

Last year, my faculty created a funding support service separate from the university’s already existing grant support service to help increase the faculty's number of winning grants. I found the service’s practices, to keep my opinion to a minimum here, somewhat questionable. As I had no need nor a want of it, I minimized my interactions with them to almost zero. Given that I had kept my cards close to myself, the faculty reacted surprised to my win: how did a postdoctoral researcher who barely used any grant service and kept her writings mostly to herself managed to win a €700 000 grant? Most people had no idea what I had been writing about—or that I had submitted a proposal at all.

I initially wanted to write a newsletter to offer something meaningful to junior and early career researchers who struggle with the grant writing process. Some words of encouragement, or some tips, perhaps. But there already exist many excellent free- and paid for blogposts on grant writing. [1] Often universities also offer support services to scholars. Another reason I wrote this newsletter is that I wanted to give myself some catharsis, a way to process my own experiences and relieve me somewhat from the tensions that came from grant writing. The result is a bit of an unstructured personal account of the challenges that I faced over the past five years that I have been writing postdoctoral-focused grant proposals. You might wonder at times what it is that I am trying to say. But that is the beauty of a newsletter: it does not go through peer review. I can express myself more freely without worrying if the letter will be published. I believe that what I have written here is more meaningful than anything else grant-writing related I could write about.

（C) Irasutoya

It took five years

It took me five years to write a successful postdoctoral grant project proposal. There is no clear formula on how to win a grant. There is no secret. For most of us, it is just a matter of trial and error, and then some luck. I applied to many jobs and grants that ultimately proved unsuccessful before I landed a successful grant. There were plenty of applications where I almost managed to land a job or a grant. I made it to several final rounds of job interviews, and I also often managed to land in the top 3% of several grant applications. When your applications are evaluated that highly, rejections are usually a matter of bad luck related to budget constraints, in my experience. For example, I have won three Seals of Excellence for my MSCA postdoctoral fellowship grant applications. A Seal of Excellence is a PDF-formatted award to recognize that the application is of a high enough standard that it should be funded but that the European Research Council (ERC) could not fund it because of budgetary constraints. In the last round in which I participated, 2025, I even managed to make it to the reserve list with a score of 95.4%. The cut-off was 96.4% for projects in the Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines. Seeing how competitive the MSCA is, I knew that not enough successful applicants would reject the funding for me to be taken off the reserve list, which ultimately meant that the proposal would not be funded. What stings is that if I had received the same score a few years ago, I would have received the funding. Many of my peers share similar experiences.

In the summer of 2025, I knew I had to dedicate the rest of the year to grant application writing. While I already had the MSCA grant project proposal, I realized my chances would probably be better if I wrote an entirely new grant project—something that I absolutely did not look forward to doing. But I had to because my fixed-term employment contract was running out. I gave myself until the DiGRA 2025 Malta conference to decide if I would write an entirely new grant project proposal or stick it out with the project proposal I already had. Talking with senior colleagues about academia during and after DiGRA helped a lot to mentally prepare myself. With their encouraging words, I ultimately decided to write a new grant project proposal, which became the GenGam project.

Although I barely made use of any grant writing services by the faculty for the GenGam project, I have actually made use of the university’s general grant writing services on occasion. Tampere University offers, among others, grant writing workshops to their MSCA applicants. In my first year at Tampere University, I participated in every MSCA workshop, which taught me not only how to write a proposal in general, but also how to read grant proposal instructions and what vocabulary to use. The MSCA is, in my opinion, one of the toughest proposals to write for early career scholars. It is not merely very competitive but also intimidating because the ERC is very specific in what an MSCA proposal should look like and what vocabulary one should use. For example, ‘dissemination,’ ‘exploitation,’ and ‘communication’ in an MSCA proposal all refer to the publication of research results but still mean very different things depending on their methods of distribution and their audiences. Any divergence from the demanded format might cost the participant much needed points—if the application is accepted for evaluation at all.

In the years following, I became more selective with my participation in grant writing workshops. The workshops simply did not offer me the support I needed anymore now that I was more experienced. I did not entirely remove myself from the workshop sessions either. I would make sure to keep up to date to any new grant call development relevant to me by (re-)watching recorded grant information sessions. Each year, grant calls will slightly change, for better or worse. The funder could change the requirements in the layout or the content, or they could change the applicant’s eligibility requirements. For example, in the first rounds of my MSCA proposal, I did not have to include an intellectual property management strategy, but in the last round I did. However, the page limit was not increased. Having to include new content in comparison to the years before means for every participant that they must cut their carefully crafted words elsewhere in the document. It also means that every participant will likely fear that by cutting away certain parts, the proposal evaluators might deduct points for not having the part that had to be cut away.

On a positive note, my experience meant that I had a good idea about the similarities between each grant relevant to me (i.e., MSCA, ERC’s Starting Grant, and the RCF’s Academy Research Fellowship). I had noticed that with each year, the grant calls started to resemble each other. Each call has its own unique goal. For instance, the MSCA is more focused on training new postdocs (including outside of academia) whereas the Academy Research Fellowship is meant to propel the careers of non-tenured early career researchers. Yet, most of these grant calls also want similar content. This meant that I could recycle past writings. For example, a new requirement for the 2026 Academy Research Fellowship proposal was a risk assessment, which is something that the MSCA grant call has demanded for years. All I had to do was to adapt the risk assessment from my MSCA proposal into my Academy Research Fellowship proposal.

The funding game

Because researchers are usually hired on fixed-term contracts for temporary projects in Finnish academia, many junior and early career researchers end up researching a topic that may not hold their main interest. To some, this setup works to some degree. To me, it simply does not. I need to be intrinsically motivated to be able to reach the rigour and creativity to get the quality that I demand from my research. Call it ambition, call it stubbornness, whatever it may be. This meant that my chances of a successfully funded grant would be higher if I wrote a proposal that I was genuinely interested in doing, even if the topic itself was not necessarily a popular topic among funding bodies.

In the book The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber use the term research capitalism to refer to the increasing pressure in academia to attract external funding from governmental bodies and corporations, and to produce knowledge directly applicable to society’s needs as determined by private and governmental bodies.[2] This is visible in, for instance, all the postdoctoral grants I wrote, where I had to clarify how the proposed research project would contribute to (one or more of) the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The UN favours applied research. But because the Humanities and the Social Sciences focus on understanding rather than applied knowledge, many researchers from these disciplines—including myself—struggle with explaining the ‘value’ of our research, and in extension, with attaining funding. When I started to check for successfully funded Humanities projects, I noticed that these projects tend to frame their research so that they pose a (partial) solution to societal issues like ‘democracy,’ ‘gender equalities,’ ‘immigration,’ ‘sustainability’ or ‘war,’ which are topics favoured by the UN. However, while these important topics surely cover some of the work done by Humanities and Social Science scholars, they do not include all of us. I study videogame characters. How is a topic like mine going to solve large-scale societal issues like immigration or war?

Across my years of writing funding proposals, I received a number of tips on how to tackle such a struggle. This included well-intended but poor advisory comments such as “just design an educative game,” and “it’s not that hard, [enter any other research field] has it much harder,” and practical but shallow advice such as “just say you will organize a [enter a well-known] conference” and “do not solve all societal issues just contribute to the solution.” The best advice was the one that had me reflect on trying to find a balance between the research I want to do and what I can receive money for. Which took me five years of finding, by the way. But it worked. Eventually.

As scholars, we are basically forced to comply with the funding game. At least, somewhat. For me, it meant that I had to learn to connect my research interests (like, game characters) to, what I call in my own head, an ‘umbrella topic,’ a larger phenomenon that is expressed via my research interests. The umbrella topic for the GenGam project is ‘gamblification,’ the phenomenon of digital platforms becoming more like gambling and gambling becoming more like (digital) games. Admittedly, I was never that interested in research on gambling, loot boxes, game monetization, or free-to-play games. But since I saw a connection to topics that do interest me (East Asian games, game characters, parasocial relationships, etc.), my interest in gamblification gradually grew. The reason for this was Genshin Impact, a game from China that scholarly friends introduced me to in 2021. Genshin Impact is probably one of the reasons why gacha games from East Asia have become so popular in the last five years.[3] Initially, I was interested only in the game’s characters, but soon the game’s free-to-play monetization format caught my eye as well, because I came to realize that scholarly work on game platforms and monetization tend to look at the USA as a default—a common occurrence in English-speaking academia. There still was a lot to explore.

I had also become interested in women’s gaming formats, which tend to be designed around women’s labour and productivity. In East Asia, a popular women’s gaming format is the otome game genre. Otome games have been around since the 1990s and were first created in Japan with (cis- and straight) women as their target audience. Nowadays, these games are more widely played by different consumers, and their monetization has changed from premium (i.e., buying the entire game in a physical/digital store) to free-to-play. Most otome games have become gacha games with a gacha mechanism through which players try to obtain a desired (handsome, male) game character, which they may or may not successfully get. During my years of grant writing, I had noticed that most governmental initiatives occupied with online safety in gaming and gambling focus either on children and families, or stereotypical masculine gambling. Research and governments alike tend to overlook formats that fall outside those brackets. The labubu doll hype in the summer of 2025, seemingly made popular because of a K-pop idol, saw cute designer dolls from China sold en masse globally in randomized blind box formats. That hype convinced me that now was the right time to write a proposal about gaming and gamblification formats in women’s consumption culture, particularly focused on East Asia.

I went on a Labubu search spree in Summer 2025. And found curious fakes. (C) Joleen Blom

Why should my work be funded?

I knew my topic, but I had to make sure that my proposal could convince an evaluation committee that my research was worth funding for four years. The difficulty is that the current world is in a state of poly crisis. Costs are increasing, and there are budget cuts everywhere. There is less money now for my kind of research than the year I started to write grant proposals. Given that situation, I had to ask myself the question: why would a government fund my research? Or rather, “why should someone give me money to research labubu?” What is at stake if my research is not done? The answer took me months to formulate, and in reality, even more because I needed years of time, thinking, and research to be able to formulate the answer at all. My answer became that if governments and research do not know the different ways through which gamblification materializes, and only focus on stereotypical formats (e.g., lootboxes, casino apps etc.), then they will not recognize where and how to protect consumers that fall outside of those stereotypes.

My research had slowly started to become about consumer protection, which helped me address those SDGs. I had been gathering information from industry, research, and governmental reports, newspaper articles, websites, initiatives, and any other related documents on gaming and gambling—especially from Europe—across the past years to know that gamblification was nowadays recognized as a societal issue. This helped me connect the GenGam project to SDG12 ‘Responsible consumption and production,’ and SDG5 ‘Gender equality.’ I did not force my research to fit these goals and their targets to a tee but rather, I became able to show that my work was contributing to the spirit of these goals. The connection became a natural one rather a forced one. That said, I do not like and will not discuss my entire research within the frame of contributing to these goals. I believe that doing so might take away the curiosity and creativity as the core drivers of my research when I force myself to only do research that contributes to these goals.

If there any takeaways from this newsletter for junior and early career researchers struggling with writing grants, then let it be to write something that makes sense for your research and for you as a researcher. Write the proposal and consider the constraints that you are under (e.g., personal life, work life, mentally, funding requirements, etc.). Try to find a balance between what you want, what you can do, and what you can get. Do not promise the moon when you cannot deliver it. Find your research contribution. You do not have to write down anything that others tell you should if it does not fit your research but be able to explain why your research matters in a convincing way. It is possible to research something that looks whimsical at first, like videogame characters, but it is not easy. My research is at its best when I can be creative and curious, but I am also in a situation where I can afford to prioritise those drivers. I do not propose an easy path. I cannot offer an easy solution or give a trade secret because they do not exist. This takeaway is not a one-size-fits-all; it will not work for everyone, but it might work for some. And I like to think it can be a worthwhile one.

At last

It took me years to be able to write a successful grant proposal. There is no secret to writing a succesful grant proposal. For me, I think it was a combination of skill, years of trying and failing, and then some well-timed luck. I wrote the first proposal draft for GenGam in the summer of 2025, but it took me years to be able to write it. It did not happen overnight.

Now comes the time that I will need to implement the project and to actually do the research I promised I would do. The GenGam project will have three team members, me and two doctoral researchers, who shall be introduced at a later point in time. While my anger has definitely cooled down somewhat, I am now facing a personal challenge of having to find a balance between shallow performative indicators of success in research (measurability! leadership! societal impact!) and a want to conduct authentic meaningful work. I do not know what that balance looks like yet for me but at least I am excited to find out.

If you made it all the way to the end of this post, I thank you for your patience. I had a lot to say. The letter became really large but it was cathartic for me to write it. I hope that it will be meaningful for you to have read it.

-- Joleen

[1] Personally, I like ‘How to win a grant – Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions’ by Giulia Evolvi because its Q&A structure gives detailed answers to how to write a MSCA postdoc proposal. I also like this one one by Anna Zhelnina about when you do not win a grant and what to do then.

[2] Berg and Seeber use the term ‘research capitalism’ as defined by Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli in Retooling the Humanities: The Cultural of Research in Canadian Universities (2011).

[3] Gacha games is a term to refer to free-to-play games, usually from East Asia, that use the gacha mechanism as their monetization format. This usually means players try to obtain a character from a set of randomized characters, which means they may or may not obtain the character they want.