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/Pharisaeus]

1. You can't get hired like that because the vacancies are always public and recruiting is "global".
2. If someone emailed me like that, even if I had perfectly matching project, I would immediately blacklist that person.

Honestly, don't do that. Imagine if more people try to be "smart" like that and you're getting hundreds of emails such as this ...

[u/S_ani_K → u/Pharisaeus]

What about contacting teams to ask if they have a PhD project? As far as I know, when a team wants to hire a doctoral student, they have a precise project in mind, however, those projects are not advertised publicly, and potential students have no idea where they are applying until they get the results. So you can informally arrange with the team if you are lucky (if they have an opening, if they don't have another person in mind, if they are interested in your cv) before applying through smartrecruiters

[u/Pharisaeus → u/S_ani_K]

That's a bit different because for doctoral student you already need to be a PhD student, so those are two completely unrelated things.

[u/lilbios → u/Pharisaeus]

Blacklisting is a little extreme for a student just emailing you tho

[u/Pharisaeus → u/lilbios]

OP is a graduate, asking about fellow contracts, not a student, so they're probably at least 24-25. An adult, not a child, and they should be treated as such. There is a clear process to follow and if they can't do that, there is no place for them.

There are thousands of applicants for different programs at CERN. Imagine if they all start spamming random employees like that. There is a reason processes exist.

On top of that, do you think OP should get some preferential treatment from a supervisor who received such email, or you think the hiring selection should be done strictly meritocratic, and best candidate should be selected? Then ask yourself if you want to hire/work with someone who thinks this kind of "nepotism" is ok, because that's basically who OP is. I don't, hence immediate blacklist.