During my summer internship at CERN, I was very grateful to get involved with CMS' outreach program through their blog, The Cylindrical Onion. Below is my submission talking (a bit pretentiously) about my experience. Check out the original blog post on the CMS website as well as the entries from some of the other students I worked with this summer.
While working at CERN this summer, I’ve been amazed to find the perfect synthesis of all my interests both inside and outside of the lab. In the last few years of my university studies, I’ve narrowed down my research interests down to the intersection of high energy physics, experimental physics, and data science; and so on paper CERN was the perfect place to be and working with CMS has only confirmed these assumptions.
While this was not my first exposure to research of the areas above, it’s an entirely different experience to be in a place where one of the world’s leading experts in your field or the person who wrote all the code your project is built upon is down the hall, available and happy to answer any questions you might have.
Outside of research, I’ve been delighted to find that CERN operates less like a large office complex and more like a college campus or small town with a surprisingly vibrant social scene of students and faculty alike. I’ve been very grateful to the summer student program, which has placed me around hundreds of students from around the world who all share a mutual enthusiasm for physics, engineering, and science.
Many of the friends I’ve made in my time here have been equally excited to obsess about their research projects as they are to explore the newest music festival, make midnight runs to grab kebab downtown, or to take weekend trips to explore the surrounding countries Geneva is situated between. I’m incredibly appreciative of my time here this summer and I’m hoping this is the first but not the last time I’ll be at CERN.
