This year, I applied to a full time researcher position at INRIA (Chargé de Recherche première classe -- CR1). I filled an application, which got reviewed, and then I was asked to do a presentation about my research program and why the INRIA should take me instead of the (other?) brillant applicants.

It went rather well in that sense that I was ranked third ex-aequo on the position I want. In contrary to what one may think, it's not done and lost yet, because the final decision it taken by the INRIA CEO and a commission, and they usually completely change the initial rankings. For example, the first in Nancy (where I apply) is also first in the Grenoble INRIA center, and it's not clear whether the final commission will choose to put him in Nancy or Grenoble. And the same apply to the second one, to some extend that are too long and uncertain to be explained here in full details.

The certain thing is that it's rather hard to keep motivated when you don't know whether you should work on getting new grants to fill a full time researcher agenda, or whether you should work on improving your teachings for the next year and try to survive with two almost-full-time positions in both research and teaching.

For example, I should work on building the next ANR call to make sure that USS-SimGrid fundings are followed by other equivalent ones. The topic of open science is rather appealing here. On the other hand, I should redo almost from scratch my teachings of the C programming language to generalize to every student groups what I've experimented this year. JLM would also need some more love. But I think I won't be able to do all of this at the same time.

I'm thus in a rather expectative state, waiting for other to decide what I should do next. Good that the final decision is expected next week: it becomes long, frustrating, and somehow dangerous for my mental health...