Tom - BSc Computer Science
Working with the Centre for Complex
Cooperative Systems in BIT (Bristol Institute for Technology) for
my final year project and my placement at CERN helped me to get
this job.
Experience
Job title
Fellow
Employer/organisation name
CERN - European Centre for Nuclear Research
Location
Geneva, Switzerland
What did the application process involve for your job?
Since I had already worked for CERN for 14
months on placement during my sandwich degree, the application
process involved an on-line application form and CV submission.
Normally a face to face interview is required but since I had
already worked for them this step was missed.
What skills, knowledge and experience contributed to you getting this job?
I think my experience of working with the
Centre for Complex Cooperative Systems in BIT (Bristol Institute
for Technology) for my final year project helped me to get this job
since I was exposed to Computing Grid environments and explored
lots of technologies which are relevant to my current job. Also, my
experience of having worked at CERN before must have helped.
What typical tasks and activities did/does your role involve?
CERN is a research organisation first and
foremost and so my work is very different from somebody that might
work in a corporate environment. I am working on three separate
projects at the moment. The first one is maintaining a software
service my section provides called Service Level Status which
provides availability information on all of the computers in the
Computer Centre at CERN and those outside of CERN on what is known
as the Computing Grid. The second role I have is developing for the
LHC Era Monitoring (LEMON) tool which monitors all computers in our
Computer Centre providing access to metrics and visual
representations of them. The tool in question previously only
supported an Enterprise Oracle database but since the software is
open-source it is required to support open-source databases too
such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. The third role I have is
investigating how we can integrate some popular commercial software
into our organisation for knowledge sharing and community problem
resolutions and customise it to achieve exactly what we want.
What did/do you enjoy most about your role?
I enjoy working at a leading world research
centre aiding physicists in ground-breaking research which could
truly change the world. I enjoy the international atmosphere of the
organisation and the variety of tasks which I must complete. I also
like the way that I can shape my work and suggest changes which
should be made to software and then implement them rather than
being simply presented with a specification and then following it
exactly.
Give an example of an activity that you undertook that was particularly challenging or interesting.
In my section we provide weekly activity
reports to our section leader, after explaining what I was doing
and justifying it with a series of presentation slides it was
suggested that I present to the entire group at a group meeting
(50+ people) including managers and superiors in the IT Auditorium.
I embraced the opportunity to introduce myself formally to my
colleagues (I hadn't met all of them) and put my ideas on my
project to them and get feedback for them.
What advice would you give to UWE students who would like to get similar work to yours?
Get involved at active research groups
within your faculty if possible, on return from my placement I had
a solid idea of what field I wanted to research for my project (the
broad area of the Semantic Web). After a bit of research I found
that there was a research group working on exactly these kind of
projects and they were event partnered with CERN which really
helped me to get my job upon graduation.
Where do you hope your career will go from here?
It is not known yet whether I will stay in
research for the long term or enter the corporate world but I do
hope that I can remain abroad as I'm actively learning French and
get lots of opportunity to practice it. At the moment I'm
completely satisfied with the work I'm doing and hope to remain and
gain experience from other groups around CERN over the next few
years.
Page last updated 25 November 2011