TÜBİTAK invited me to the MSCA 2025 Calls Conference in Ankara to talk about my project, and the title they gave me was "How to Be Excellent Enough." Intimidating title to be given. And honestly, I had no clear idea how to be excellent per se, especially when the subject is MSCA, which is one of the most competitive funding schemes in Europe. Excellence, as it turns out, is also one of the three formal MSCA evaluation criteria, and one of the most seemingly opaque ones. Once you look at it that way, the brief starts to make sense.
It has a clear internal logic, and that is what I tried to decode in the presentation. I shared my actual reviewer feedback report, where I fell short and where I did considerably better, to make that logic visible to anyone preparing their first application without knowing what reviewers are actually looking for.
The MSCA process is demanding but not mysterious, and that distinction is worth making out loud. The presentation materials are publicly available if you are curious.