Not Ready Yet? Accelerating the ERC Pathway with Unite! Widening
From 14 to 16 July, T茅cnico ULisboa in Lisbon hosted Accelerate Your ERC Pathway, a training run under Unite!Widening, the initiative through which the Unite! university alliance builds research capacity across its member institutions. Aalto University took part as one of the participating universities, sending Angela Suorsa, Specialist at Aalto, as a trainer. Participants came from different European countries and included researchers, postdocs, and associate professors, all at different stages of preparing for a competitive ERC application.
The three days combined ERC fundamentals with hands-on pitch practice, delivered together with Aavanz, so that participants left not just understanding how ERC evaluation works, but having actually tested their own research pitch in front of trainers and peers from other countries and other fields.
Angela Suorsa, Specialist and ERC instructor, Aalto University.鈥淪top waiting to be ready. What I hear again and again isn鈥檛 a lack of ability, it鈥檚 fear. Researchers with genuinely groundbreaking work still hold back from applying, because somewhere they鈥檝e decided they鈥檙e not ready yet. But readiness isn鈥檛 a feeling you wait for. It鈥檚 something you build by starting: by drafting, testing your pitch, and learning as you go,鈥
That shift, from waiting to starting, is precisely what an alliance model is built to produce. No single university, however strong, can hand a researcher a room full of people who have each solved the same funding puzzle a different way. Unite!Widening exists to make that room possible, pooling trainers, mentors, and researchers from across its member universities so that the knowledge one institution has built up doesn鈥檛 stay local.