Dreams Coming True Too Fast

Well, this is going to feel weird anyway. I hope I got your attention by now :) So during the last months my life got crazy multiple times. You know those days when everything is going great? Me too. And I just had a few months that felt like that. The funny thing is that when something outrageously awesome happens, you actually need to give up some lesser dreams to go for the big ones...

As any other good story, this one starts with a failure. Actually a few of them. I applied for CERN Summer Student Program in 2012 and was rejected. I went to the US and worked as a researcher at Union College over the summer in 2013. Then I came back to the Czech Republic and graduated.

So I applied again this year for Summer Student and almost accidentally for openlab as well. And I got a rejection email in April. It felt weird because I really thought I would get accepted this time. I felt like there was not much more I could do to be a better fit.

At this point, my friend Roman who works at McKinsey in Prague encouraged me to apply for an intern position. It took some time to polish my resume and motivation letter but I made it and was invited to take a first round written test assessing my analytical abilities.

How surprised was I when I got an email from CERN saying that I was accepted for openlab. I couldn't believe it. It was like winning a lottery. There are thousands of people applying and only 24 students from all over the world get accepted. I was just so lucky. Working at CERN has been one of my dreams for a few years and now it would come true.

Then I broke up with my boyfriend who was also going to CERN as a Summer Student. This is probably the most unlikely thing that ever happened to me. Whatever. I was stressed and confused and I needed to go to the interviews at McKinsey. I felt bad because I wouldn't have time in the summer but I thought it was so unlikely to get in that it was useless to worry about it. I worked like hell for a few weeks, did well in the written test, and then I got terribly nervous before the interviews. So brainwashed myself with TED Talks about mistakes, failures, happiness and hard choices. And it helped! I got an internship offer. Just to be clear, this is a dream job. I won the lottery twice in one month.

To be able to work at McKinsey, I needed to cancel Erasmus in Spain I'd been looking forward for several years. That was pretty difficult and interesting, because I had to give up a big dream but just to make something even better happen. I feel better about it now. There is more thinking behind but that would make this post even longer than it already is.

The last change was to give up being an editor-in-chief of a student magazine Corpus Omne at my home faculty after three years. I never realized how much I cared about the magazine :) I found a perfect, young, smart, and beautiful editor-in-chief Jana and she'll be even better than I was :) I'm so happy for this and it also makes me feel old or something. I was used to being always the young one.

And here I am. Working at CERN, blogging about my life and drinking French red wine. I was stressed and confused because I thought I suddenly became a different person. Then I realized it's still me, just the other people will see me differently now. I have no idea what will be the next crazy thing that will happen to me, but I'm pretty sure it will be an awesome experience. Just as it has always been.

A piece of the accelerator and me