I’m so excited!

Wow I’m going to Switzerland in just a few days!

I’ll be staying with Marty’s parents in Nyon, Switzerland and commuting to CERN every day with Marty’s dad.  For the first week, I will attend CMS Physics Week and get settled in and file the proper forms to get started.  Then for three weeks, I will basically shadow a post-doc who works for UF.

I have done as much preparing in advance as possible: provisional user registration, creating a computer account, and bracing myself to format my laptop for Scientific Linux CERN 4.  SLC4 is the operating system used at CERN, but I can’t install it until my laptop is registered on site.   

This list of preparations seems short, but I truly needed two weeks to get it all done.  Afterall, 8am EST is 2pm in Geneva, so our business hours only overlap by 3 hours.  Thankfully my passport is up to date, and I won’t need a Visa, otherwise one should allow two months to prepare for working at CERN.

Goals for this trip:

- Get as much as I can out of the CMS physics week meetings

- Get accustomed to Linux

- Ask a lot of questions

- Meet people

- Learn to run jobs on the lxplus cluster

- Figure out housing options for future vists

 

I can’t wait to see my lovely McCrorys!