This post is mainly to indicate that I’m alive and blogging plus I wanted to share a few observations from my two month long freelancing scientist life:

1. If you are unemployed, but affiliated with an academic institution, applying for grants is OK, but getting an award for young and (possibly) smart is most of the time not possible (formal employment is usually required)

2. It takes very little time to sink in new projects (it’s me right now), after you’ve announced that you go freelance. That usually means:

3. It can take little time to go from no-salary to almost-a-salary-from-several-grants. Count grant turnover times in.

4. You have a lot (I mean really a lot) of skills that can be useful outside the academia. So useful that others may want to pay for them (I’ll let you know in a few months). And I’m not talking about programming.

5. You can switch the field in no time. It’s like going for a postdoc, sinking in projects and after few weeks deciding that after all it’s not that interesting. Although I keep in mind that I need to settle to have anything done.