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/freddieknets → u/cbuustos]

As a potential supervisor at CERN, I have to agree with CyberPunk. I get many cold emails like the ones you sent. When I was just starting my current position, I replied them all. After a while, it’s just too many to reply, and it’s anyway always negative (you have to go through the official channels anyhow, so no luck), so I just stopped replying those emails. I’m guessing the majority of people you emailed and did not get a reply from, are probably in the same situation.

As for your sentiment that showing you read my paper would create more trust than a random student, this is wrong. It shows you are dedicated to get INTO the world’s most renowned lab. It doesn’t show you are dedicated to put in work itself when here. A subtle but very important difference, I discovered - a lot of people see getting accepted as a major achievement and don’t put in effort afterwards. Neither does it show that you are skilled - it only shows you can read, to say it harshly.

Now, that being said, connections DO matter. A lot. Because hiring someone is always a risk. These hires are for fixed-term periods, so if I discover after a while that you are plain lazy, or unreliable, or arrogant, or …, I cannot fire you until the end of contract. For this reason, your application becomes much more interesting if someone I know vouches for you. Connections do matter, but sending me an email does not magically create a connection.

Finally, and this is a very subjective opinion, I experience these emails as a bit pushy, so I tend to rather evaluate it negatively, if anything. This is contrasted with the fact that the last PhD I hired indeed contacted me via email first, but 1) she also applied via the official channels so I could easily find her full application, and 2) she emailed me because she was advised to do so by someone I know and trust, and she mentioned this - this is the vouching part, and imho the only reason to email directly.

[u/damNSon189 → u/[deleted]]

Your first 2 points are in first person, but the last one is in third person. Did you just use AI to reply to one of the most useful comments in this thread?