Some UK and European Resources for North American Music Science Graduate Students

Last week at SMPC 2022 I participated on a panel that tried to dole out as much advice as possible to graduate students in the field of music science / music cognition as what they might want to do after grad school. One area that I have relatively more experience in (keyword: relatively) compared to some of my other North American colleagues is knowledge of all things UK / Euro when it comes to research opportunities in our field, but on the other side of the pond. I fielded one long-winded answer to a question about this on the panel, but promised a better follow-up email, which consequently felt like it should be a blog post for anyone else that might be interested in this question.

Unit of the Grant

Working on Someone Else’s Grant

One of the biggest differences (footnote: in my experience!) between what I have seen in the world of higher education employment for non-permanent staff (aka PhDs and Postdocs) between the USA and the UK and Europe (and I imagine Canada too?) is how you basically need to have an established project before you get started on any research. This is quite different from doing your PhD in the USA, where you are essentially accepted as a ‘student’ either via a fellowship or a teaching contract or are self-funded to do all the many things required to complete your degree (e.g classes, teaching, qualifying exams, general exams, thesis, defense/viva). These things of course happen in UK/Euro PhDs, but all to different extents.

For example, in my current role as a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam, I am working on a limited-term, three year contract where the applicants for the project budgeted for both a PhD student and post-doc to undertake a very specific question. You can see an overview of that project here taken from the MCG Website.

This model of applying for a grant, then having it fund a certain set of limited positions is probably the most stress free way of working as an academic straight out of grad school. My last job in the psychology department at Goldsmiths as well as work on the TROMPA project via the computing department at Goldsmiths were also this type of job.

Many UK and EU projects follow this model and if you’re interested in just seeing what is out there, check out both jobs.ac.uk and sign up some of these list-servs that seem relevant to your interests:

Subscribing to all these list-servs will destroy your inbox, so it’s worth making like a separate tab or filter for all of these…

Working on Your Own Project/Grant

Working as a part of an already up-and-running project is not the only option of course. You can also pitch and propose your own project.

This of course requires a lot more forward thinking (like at least a year to be safe), so if you are a PhD student now, it’s worth starting to both browse and see what is out there now and then once you have an idea, send out some introduction emails (more on that below).

The very, very rough way it works is that you find some sort of funding source (be that a funding agency like Leverhulme, a location where you might want to work such as The Centre for Music and Science) and attempt to triangulate a project that connects what you are interested in with the interests of your funding source.

You of course also have to write a killer/competitive funding application that will get selected.

Like picking a Masters or PhD advisor, the best shout here is ideally find some location or group of researchers with shared interest in your project. If you think about things from the point of view of the location you are going to work for, the group or individual that you are going to work with is going to be a lot more personally invested in helping you navigate the application and your time there if there is some sort of congruity in the field of research.

I have heard of people who just apply on a great project, then kind of just use the resources of the institution to do their own thing, which is also possible.

So given that, my advice would be to:

  1. Have some sort of idea of what your ideal project would be (sketch it out!)
  2. Find funding bodies that would be appropriate for this type of work (put the research chops to use)
  3. Contact the relevant people with your general project idea, possible ideas of sources for funding, and some sort of clear project proposal and float the idea past them.

Ideally after step 1, you can go to your current PhD supervisor and ask them if they know anyone who might do this kind of work and hopefully after doing an entire PhD on a topic there might be one or two working academics who you would love to collaborate with… which is a long winded way to say that much of these suggestions of who to work with next and where the funding come from can come from word-of-mouth or other people who have done something like what you envision.

Some people you end up contacting might be interested in helping your flesh out your rough idea. If they do that (and even suggest changing it a lot), I would take that as a good sign in that they are personally interested in your project and want to see it succeed. Some people might just say that you should go for it and cross your fingers it gets accepted. If you get no response whatsoever, that’s probably a red flag.

There are several funding sources I am aware of in the UK and Europe that do fund this type of thing and I am positive that someone else has collated a better list than me (also if anyone reading this knows ones I could add that are not temporary, more than happy to add them here for posterity!), but there are enough below that kind of let you have an idea of the time frames

Here are a list of funding sources that I have heard people get recently within our field, but there are many more.

I would also check out many of the programs getting funded by the EU Horizons Project which was how TROMPA (a project I was on) was funded. Have a peek at who the universities were that were involved, send an email to the PIs of the groups that were funded.

I also know that the Oxbridge groups sometimes have money set aside for PhDs, maybe some post-doc work, but it’s really a matter of having a pretty clear idea of what you might want to do ahead of time, what they do, then getting in touch with someone like the director of the Centre for Music and Science very early and articulating why this might be good fit for a future collaboration after reading about what they are interested in.

More Ideas

The other places to check out for our field of music and science are the very big centers that seem to have a lot of funding capabilties (as evidenced by the size of the groups/publications) might include:

Which (as of writing in 2022) have three departments:

That further subdivide into:

This group also works a fair bit with the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences as well, but the collaborations that I was aware of at time of writing in summer of 2022 might not be around in a few years. Such is the way of research funding.

I’d check out each group, their recent publications, and get in touch with the group leaders if what they are working on interests you.

Is a very large group out of the University of Oslo has been posting tons of very cool looking positions recently.

Is run by Martin Rohrmeier and they do a lot of computational theory / history work. Again, take a look at their recent publications and email some of the authors that still appear to be active in the group.

If someone is reading this and I didn’t list your group and you think it should be on this post, please get in touch, I will add it. I wrote the draft of this post on an overnight flight back to Europe and most certainly have peppered it with errors.

TLDR

The long story short is there are places to fund work after your PhD in Europe (and a lot of this advice is similar if you are looking for a PhD), but the the best way to be lucky enough to get said funding is to do a lot of prep work both in terms of knowing what is out there in terms of funding and how that aligns with what you want to do.

Addendum: Writing Advice if English is not your first language

Note: I have had the privlidge of not only having English as my first language, but also never having had to work in another langauge, so consider this when reading my advice on this!

Lastly, I would be remiss not to mention that when applying for these types of funding schemes/grants, they are incredibly competitive. What that means from a practical point of view (and was inspired by the person who inspired me to write this post instead of send a long email that will never see the light of day) is that it is extremely important that the writing, grammar, spelling, and formatting of these applications is of the highest quality. Whether it is “good” or not, people looking to select a winning application (job, grant?) will often find dumb reasons to cut some applications out of the running, sometimes that ends up being bad formatting, grammar, and spelling issues.

It’s very important to get many sets of eyes on your work (maybe have a shared Google Doc where you give people comment rights?) so technical writing errors are caught early and often. Find a few people you trust to do this type of proofreading for you and make sure to give them tons of time as well– when asked to do this type of work at the last second, it’s often quite stressful as the proofreader and as a result you can never do your best work either.

In my experience working with students whose first language is not English, I always try to take a moment and make three points very clear when we start writing things together:

  1. Academic writing is difficult even for native speakers (reviewers have asked if I am a native speaker before!) so regardless of someone’s background, part of the joint-writing process is about making sure the tone is right and all authors on a document should feel free to comment on how something is said.
  2. That said, when I do suggest a change in wording/phrasing in a joint-document, in addition to changing the text, I always try to provide an explanation of why this was changed. If you do not do this as a native speaker, this is not at all helpful for whoever wrote the first draft and completely neglects the responsibility and privlidge you have in an educational setting that presumes mastery of academic English! It takes a lot of time and effort to do this, but at the end of the day, we all work in higher education and learning to write is part of this.
  3. It its perfectly OK to use something like Grammarly to help write, but please your colleagues know if you are doing this so they know if a change that is made is because of the author or a bot.

The best advice I could give on any of this probably comes from my Dad who always insists on writing anything and everything down. It’s not real until you write it down.

It’s OK for it not to be good at first when you write it down, but what is not OK is thinking you have to get it perfect before you send it to other people. As long as you can read what you have written out loud (actually do this!) and it basically “feels” right, then it’s OK to get someone else’s eyes on it. Not everyone will agree with me on that (I try not to do this with peers, more when the power dynamic is a junior person asking a more senior person to read something!) but to each their own when it comes to how to navigate this.

In some ways (not to start on an entirely different blog post here) but it could even be a good exercise in letting go by sending readable, but very unpolished work to someone to get feedback on (maybe just a very fleshed out outline?). Many small iterations and passes are always better than spending months writing a document, only to get it torn to pieces by an adviser in one spirit crushing sitting.

#email-faq