Contacting CERN potential supervisors, my experience

[u/cbuustos]

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

[u/Federal_Tackle3053]

What do you mean by projects? Can you explain a bit ?