Student Life: Visiting CERN for the first time!
PhD students who join CERN experiments need to visit the laboratory often to perform experiment duties or attend meetings and talk in person with collaborators. Our 1st year PhD student Jordan Li visited CERN for the first time in the last week of February to complete his registration and attend a workshop. Jordan has started a thesis on di-Higgs production in the ATLAS experiment.
The Di-Higgs workshop that was taking place recently was an excellent opportunity for Jordan to go to CERN, finish the bureaucracy and talk in person with collaborators he had only met via video conference meetings. Jordan comments on his first impression of CERN: “... a huge, almost industrial complex, buildings scattered all over the place... It is in the restaurants that you can discover the true flavour of CERN, along with Swiss cooking. At surrounding tables, animated discussions about high-flown theories, intricate experiments, or the best places for skiing, are going on in half a dozen languages, with Broken English predominant. Physicists from many countries, dressed informally for hard work, forge friendships over their hurried meals.”
For the workshop, Jordan mentions: “It is a nice chance to connect voices to faces. It is also thrilling that you never who is the next person you are going to meet.” And concludes with: “CERN seems to be always a nice place to study, work and socialize.”