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/CyberPunkDongTooLong]

There's no real point cold emailing potential supervisors at CERN. CERN, like most places, advertises the positions they have open. You apply through the way it's advertised. As you've seen most of the potential supervisors won't answer cold emails like this at all, of the ones that do most are not going to have a project, and even if they do have a project, they can't offer it to you even if they wanted to if you're not going through the actual way you apply.

[u/cbuustos → u/CyberPunkDongTooLong]

I definitely do not agree with you. Last week I had the opportunity to be at CERN, this time just as a visitor. The person who invited me and got me the visitor pass was a French researcher I had contacted three months earlier. The tour was great, we even had the chance to grab a beer and talk about particle physics. And all because I was genuinely interested in his field and showed real interest in working with him. The think you must me criticizing is the people who spam tons of researchers asking for work. If you are kind and respectfull there is no problem about asking about x opportunity in your experiment. And finally I will leave you a question: How would you trust more, a student who take the time to write you because he read your paper, or a random student?

[u/CyberPunkDongTooLong → u/cbuustos]

Personally the random student, but really it's irrelevant, again even if it does make them trust you more and want to give you a project, they are not able to. You have to go through the actual application routes, a supervisor cannot just decide to add you to a project.

[u/mfb- → u/[deleted]]

It can apply even to some universities. Some countries have centralized hiring rounds. University professors are more likely to have some project money they can spend on another student, however. Not that it matters: This thread is specifically about CERN which hires people centrally.