Contacting CERN potential supervisors, my experience
Hi! I am a recent physics graduate from a small university in Spain. Small enough that in all my years there, I never crossed paths with a single person who had actually worked at CERN. No professor with a direct line in, no alumni to ask for a referral, nothing. So I decided to track down potential supervisors myself and email them directly, hoping to get hired at entry-level that way.
By "potential supervisor", I mean a researcher who had supervised someone the previous year. From there, I narrowed the list down to researchers whose background matched mine, specifically those working with deep learning methods for data reconstruction.
As someone who hates spam, I personalise every text according to the person I am writing to (common sense). I don't copy-paste the mail. I dig into their department and past work and compare it to my own background. Then I read the report of their previous student, which I cite as an example of the kind of work I'd like to do.
I also attached a table of the nationalities and reply status of the people I contacted. Special thanks to the French, possibly the kindest people I came across.
If anyone's applying to CERN (or anywhere with zero internal connections) and wants to compare notes, feel free to drop a comment. And if anyone happens to be looking for an engineer for their project, feel free to shoot me a message ;)
| Nationality | Contacted | Replied |
|---|---|---|
| Italian | 11 | 1 |
| German | 9 | 1 |
| Spanish | 3 | 1 |
| Turkish | 3 | 0 |
| Dutch | 3 | 2 |
| Czech | 2 | 1 |
| Chinese | 2 | 0 |
| Indian | 2 | 2 |
| French | 2 | 1 |
| Polish | 2 | 2 |
| Belgian | 2 | 1 |
| Irish | 1 | 0 |
| Venezuelan | 1 | 1 |
| Swiss | 1 | 0 |
| British | 1 | 0 |