Applying a grant – the process behind GROW and INSEQU projects
Mar Facchini & Mijail Figueroa González
Thirty years ago, the European Commission launched its flagships funding scheme for PhD students and early-career researchers, honouring the legacy of a woman who transformed science through her innovative ideas: Marie Skłodowska-Curie.
The postdoctoral fellowship is a mobility grant. It promotes a fruitful exchange between researchers, who learn new skills abroad, and research institutions, that host curious new scholars. In 2024 and 2025, we were both awarded a postdoctoral fellowship to realise our respective projects: GROW (2025–2027) and INSEQU (2026–2028).
GROW, led by Mijail Figueroa González, investigates how student employment while at university influences social inequalities in education and labour market trajectories across Europe.
INSEQU, led by Marta (Mar) Facchini, examines how parents’ work trajectories are linked to children’s psycho-physical health and education.
Before discussing our projects’ main ideas, we will tell you about our experience with the application process for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) postdoctoral fellowship. We will also share why we believe that the INVEST Research Flagship Centre at the University of Turku is an excellent host institution for our projects and maybe also for you, future applicant!
1. MSCA application process
Every application process is unique, and you can see it in our own experiences.
GROW
The successful application for GROW started two years before it was finally awarded. I started that application in a transition period between jobs, which gave me a full month to focus entirely on developing the proposal.
To understand what was expected in each section, I immersed myself in the support available within my network. I attended information sessions offered by the university where I had just finished working, by the National Contact Points of both the host and home countries, by the MSCA actions themselves, and by universities in the target country. There was a lot of repetition, for sure, but also some small new inputs that resonated different as my proposal evolved.
At each information session, grantees and their supervisors shared their experiences. I realized that the application process varies greatly: some succeed on the first attempt –like Mar!– while others only receive funding after a second try–like me. After the events I asked former grantees to share their successful proposals. In the end I had access to a few of those from different calls, and I could see how strong sections were structured and justified.
When I received the rejection (😭), I had already started working at INVEST as a project manager for a Horizon Europe project. This position allowed me to get to know the sociologists in the community and to understand INVEST’s research environment from the inside. As I became familiar with the INVEST, it became clear that there was a strong match between my research idea and INVEST’s expertise. This new understanding gave me the confidence to propose INVEST as the host institution for my second submission. By the submission deadline, I would still have had fewer than twelve months linked to INVEST and Finland; it was mostly a matter of my new supervisor agreeing to support the application.
I shared my proposal with the project coordinator, prof. Jani Erola, and invited him to be my supervisor. Having a fully drafted proposal and detailed reviewer comments made the resubmission process more straightforward. We reviewed the feedback together, discussed the changes needed, and agreed on the best way to address the identified weaknesses. Even though the proposal was essentially complete, I attended the UTU Research Support Services summer school to receive additional comments and explore areas for improvement.
The differences between the unsuccessful and the successful versions were minimal in substantive terms. The bigger changes were related to my host institution and my supervisor. Even so they both received different comments and way different scoring. The message for me was clear, the panel composition plays an important role. Some panel members may find your research idea highly appealing, while others may be more reluctant toward it, which is then reflected on the final scoring. In my case, the second panel received my idea with more enthusiasm that the previous one. But perhaps, the small changes have had impact on the readiness and the strength of the story.
INSEQU
First things first, I was already at INVEST when I started writing the research proposal! This is a pretty special place that encourages researchers to take the time to write their own research project! Writing a proposal is an interesting and creative task. It is time-intensive, so you need to take time out from your ongoing research and teaching, which can feel scary in a job market that keep raising the required level of productivity. And its outcome is unavoidably uncertain (15% of the proposals are funded). Therefore, even in the best conditions (and I had a great supervisor, brilliant colleagues and a safe environment), one may feel it’s a dismaying path (a little like this one here below).
But how could I have a mobility grant to stay in Finland? It’s possible to apply if you have been a resident in the host country for less than 1 year in the 3 years before the call deadline. In fact, I argued that being already in Finland meant having had more time to learn how to work with administrative data and already start on this (scaringly) ambitious research plan. Thank you research services for the precious info!
I started working on the proposal in March 2024, with literature reviews, brainstorming and by collecting three successful MSCA proposal (one was Mijail’s GROW! Thank you, Mijail!). Reading previous proposals helped me a lot to understand what I needed to include in mine, and how ambitious one could be.
In April, I attended the first sessions of the MSCA prep course offered by the University of Turku and I started discussing the project with my supervisor, the extremely intelligent and kind Prof. Elina Kilpi-Jakonen. (I hope for her sake she’s not reading this. As she is a Nordic person, she’s at risk of disappearing in a cloud of compliment-induced embarrassment.)
The first draft of the research project (B1 part 1) was out in June and I started talking about it with colleagues and profs here at INVEST. Coffee breaks were not safe anymore (especially for insightful Prof. Jani Erola)! In July, I went to a couple of international conferences and had the opportunity to pick more colleagues and profs brains on my proposal. I had a little freak-out moment when a very good prof disliked (my 5-minute pitch of) the project, and here, again, my supervisor’s support was really important to keep going!
In August, I assembled the advisory board (I still can’t believe I have such brilliant scholars on my AB!) and found a strong collaborator for the last working package. After much back-and-forth with amazing Elina and Louise Settle (from the Research Services), and thanks to brilliant colleagues reading the final draft and offering great insights, I submitted the proposal on September 11 (5 minutes before boarding a flight and a few hours shy of the deadline, which I would not recommend!).
New call for applications opens on April 9th 2026
Support from UTU (this page is only for UTU-staff and students)
2. What are these MSCA-funded projects about?
GROW: High gains, high risks, for whom? A Holistic Approach to the Inequalities of Working While Studying Trajectories.
Student employment has been become a norm of contemporary student life in Europe. On average, around 80% of students combine a job while studying (Eurostudent VIII, 2024). Current research has created two opposed narratives around student employment: mostly negative effects for educational outcomes, but mostly positive or non-negative effects for the transition into the labour market. Both narratives are built on limited observation of the student work experience either at the beginning or at the end of the academic program.
GROW aims to reconciliate these two narratives by taking a holistic approach. That is, looking at the entire working while studying trajectories, from some years before starting university until some years after the prescribed study time. The goal is to observe the distinct patterns of working while studying at university, and how ascriptive characteristics, such as gender and socioeconomic background, influence the type of trajectory followed.
Most to the current research has focused on a single institution or single country samples. However, there are several reasons to suspect that the countries’ structural characteristics play a role moderating the pattern followed by students from different backgrounds, which could attenuate or amplify social inequalities in education. Some differences across countries relate to the cost of studying, tuition fees and student financial support, and the structure of the labour markets. GROW will look at students’ patterns in different countries the UK, Germany and Finland.
Another important contribution is to analyse how working while studying inequalities operate across fields of study within higher education.
Ultimately, GROW aims at informing policy makers, managers of Higher Educations institutions, and university students of the required policy interventions to reduce social inequalities in higher education due to student employment. Policy interventions that aiming at maximizing gains while diminish risks, particularly for traditionally profiles at risks.
INSEQU: Insecure Parents and Children: A Sequence Analysis Approach. A Holistic Investigation of the Role of Employment Uncertainty in the Reproduction of Social Inequalities.
Researchers have investigated the role of parental education, social class, income, and unemployment in the transmission of social inequality from one generation to the next. But there still a lot we don’t know about the effects of precarious jobs, even though having an unstable work situation has been a common experience for a few decades now.
Studies have connected employment uncertainty to lower income, more difficulty finding a job, and worse psycho-physical health of the worker and their partner. During my PhD, I was able to study the link between parents’ employment uncertainty and children’s i) health, ii) cognitive and iii) emotional development before kindergarten. The survey I used was great to zoom in on what young parents and toddlers were experiencing. Shout out to the ELFE survey, collected in France by the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED).
But I could not see what had happened before and after children’s early childhood. I also wanted to study how employment uncertainty could look like in different social classes and migration backgrounds, when one’s income is high or low, and taking into account family changes (for example, separations or getting a new sibling). For these analyses, administrative data work really well! Sequence analysis provides the tools to have a broader view of work and family life unfolding over time. I will complement the descriptive analysis with a work package focused on causal inference. Lastly, I will compare Finland, the Netherlands and the US, to study the role of different welfare systems and job protections.
3. Why did we choose INVEST?
That our projects are hosted by the INVEST is not entirely a coincidence. We had already got to know and work with some of the brilliant researchers here at INVEST. Their international network is wide, these people love to collaborate! And have a really good reputation in the biz!
Seriously, the affiliation to INVEST allow us to exchange with established and cutting-edge scholars researching sociology, economics, demography, psychology and political science, during regular meetings, workshops and seminars. We are provided with spacious and state-of-the art facilities, and the INVEST’s Communications Unit and Impact Team offer media and communication training, to broaden the outreach of our projects.
Moreover, the University of Turku UTU has extensive experience in managing and monitoring externally funded research projects, including 20 MSCA fellowships! Further support is given by the University’s services: the Research Funding unit and the Project Services assist in administrative and financial aspects of the project; Research Integrity Advisors assist with ethical aspects of the study; and International Staff Services Office and HR team assist in the integration of international employees.
More specifically to our projects, they both share the idea that a holistic approach is needed to further develop knowledge in our substantive areas of interest. In holistic approach multiple dimensions of trajectories are considered, including the sequencing of events, their timing and duration, transition patterns, and the overall complexity.
At INVEST, we have colleagues that have been contributing to develop these holistic methods: cue to the very bright and kind Satu Helske and Jouni Helske (among others amazing methodological achievements, they are seqHMM’s parents, for the fellow sequence analysis’ and Markov Models’ nerds). Which is great for training and research. Satu is also in both of ours Advisory Boards!
That’s all from us for today, thank you for reading until the very end! Time for a long stretch and a cup of coffee 😊.
Authors
Mar Facchini is a postdoctoral researcher at INVEST. She studies social inequality: how it is reproduced and how we can help reduce it.
Mijail Figueroa González is a postdoctoral researcher at INVEST. He is researching how working while studying at university shapes students’ life courses across Europe, and how risks and gains associated with student employment are socially stratified.
