Meet Daniel, a developer with the CERN web team, within the International Relations department.
Meet Daniel, a developer with the CERN web team, within the International Relations department.
As a Technical Student at CERN, I'm lucky to have the opportunity to strike an incredible balance between freedom and mentorship in my role
Tell us a little about yourself and what brought you to CERN?
I am an undergraduate in Computer Science and Machine Learning at the University of Bath, UK. I applied to CERN because its mission and values strongly align with my own (international, social, environmental, open science). Additionally, the opportunity to work at the forefront of technology and science was one I didn’t want to miss.
What do you do at CERN today?
I am a developer working on creating the new centralised system for website creation at CERN, which involves a large-scale data migration project to map the unstandardised content from over 9,000 sites to a single central system.
What is working at CERN like for you?
I couldn’t ask for more: my whole team is incredibly friendly and supportive, I have a great deal of freedom to make decisions and take the lead on feature design and development, and I get to live in a beautiful part of the world with many places to explore and activities to enjoy.
What have been the main hurdles or challenges you encountered along the way?
My advice would be: don’t live too far from CERN. In addition, at the start of my project, we had to make decisions that would impact the rest of the work. I made the right call on most of them, but there were a few where I overlooked some potential implications. However, this ultimately led us to learn a lot more about the use case for our system.
What advice would you give potential applicants?
Take the time to really understand CERN as an organisation. Familiarise yourself with the values that drive CERN and its community, as well as its core missions. When applying, demonstrate that you are the right fit by drawing on past experiences or examples of projects you have worked on, rather than simply stating why you believe you are.
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