CERN openlab Summer Student Program: What Is It Actually?

When I went to CERN, I didn't really know what would happen there. I expected a full time internship and a lot of challenging work. But the reality was far more than only that.  So what do you do as an openlab Summer Student?

There are several parts of the program:

• Working on a project
• Taking lectures on IT at CERN
• Visiting companies and research institutes
• Random stuff
• Unofficial: traveling and social life

WORKING ON A PROJECT
Everybody from the openlab had a project they worked on during the summer. Most of us worked at IT so our offices were mostly in Building 31 and 513 and we could go to lunch together every day.

As a part of the project, we gave presentations to our colleagues from IT department about our work. It was a great experience. We had to fit it in only 5 minutes time which was a challenge but it was also a lot of fun. Check it online.

To share our work with the world, all of us wrote a report which is publicly available online. One of the CERN policies is to share all of its finding publicly so do so as well. I think most of the projects were really interesting and all of us learned a lot.

TAKING LECTURES ON IT AT CERN
You can check the lectures online if you’re interested. I attended most of them but they were sometimes too technical and sometimes too much physics :) But I think I learned a lot after all and got to understand better how CERN works.

VISITING COOL PLACES
We spent a few days visiting some exciting places. We went to Zurich for two days and visited Open Systems, ETH and Google. (Epic!) Then we went to AMS, CMS, CERN Data Center, and CERN Control Center in one day. This was really amazing. I fully realized how many various projects there are at CERN.  The last visit was to Grenoble in France, where we saw a nuclear reactor and a smaller accelerator.

I also got to see ALICE with a bunch of Czech guys independently.

RANDOM STUFF

We were asked to write a short bio for the openlab website which was really fun to write since I’m pretty young and this made me feel proud of myself. It was also a challenge to fit it 100 words. It was pretty cool anyway.

There was also a video shooting. All of us were asked to introduce ourselves and describe our experience at CERN. Being interviewed felt like a movie star :) The editing will take some months so I will try to put a link here later.

UNOFFICIAL: TRAVELING AND SOCIAL LIFE

This is what the rest of the blog is about so feel free to stalk me if you want to :) I didn't include much information from party life for obvious reasons but it was great.

Dimitris put it this way: "Basically, the majority of all the summer students live in the hostel and this makes the program much more different than a normal job. It's like a campsite where people live together 24 hours a day, share their experiences and have fun. Even if you are the most introverted person in the world, it is very difficult to avoid friendships and social life in general." True that.

OVERALL

The openlab program is super selective. There were 851 applications in the CERN level round and there were only 24 of us accepted worldwide. You need to be smart, hardworking, and lucky to get in. All of this.

I am really grateful for this opportunity. I have great friends from all over the world now and I hope we will keep in touch and see each other when possible. I still feel nostalgic when I’m writing this…

So if you feel like this sounds like a good plan for the next summer, I have a piece of advice for you. Apply. Here.