71
Damn I thought it was a done deal, I even had chats with the folks at the research institute who would've offered the funding, and they were very optimistic. I was pretty much already expecting the next 4 years of my life to be done doing that.
Feeling kind of neutral about it tho. Maybe emotions will come later.
And this is the university where I am friends with a tenured professor, who was also pushing my application forward. If I apply to other places i'm certainly not gonna have that for any other applications. I don't even know what other programs to apply to.
The program i'm applying to isn't even in the US, but yea... Academia is fucked anywhere you look. I'm only insisting on this path because I've bounced from job to job for almost 10 years and research work is the only one where I don't feel like I have to kill a part of myself to be barely functional. Idk what the path forward looks like tbh.