In the current worldwide situation, every company, organization and team has had to adapt to the new limitations set up by Covid-19. The Atlas Open Data team was no exception. While the team usually brings in (majority) university students to the CERN based in Geneva, where they create histograms and help to build up the Atlas Open Data website by improving and adding more and more content. This year, of course, bringing people into CERN was difficult, so the initiative was shifted online. While at first, this seems like an issue for me, and my fellow high school student Brieuc Doucy served as an incredible opportunity to explore the scientific community and develop our skills.
Our school has a long-running program called World of Work, where high school students have to find a place in a workplace to help out or just shadow someone. The search for someone who would take a student in during these hard times was becoming extremely difficult, so when Arturo Sanchez Pineda presented us with the possibility of working at CERN, it was an extremely exciting prospect. After so much searching, the only things offered to us were to essentially be an observer in the workplace and sit in on meetings. While this is helpful to get a feel for post graduation life, it certainly wasn’t engaging or a good way to broaden our skills. We weren’t one hundred per cent sure what our work would be like at CERN but nevertheless, the idea of actually being able to contribute something was amazing. So on our first day, we entered our Zoom meeting with a measured amount of excitement not to raise our expectations too much.
Both of us were not particularly versed in high energy physics (HEP), and with our high school level of knowledge, there was some concern about whether or not we would be able to keep up with the advanced science that would be going on around us. Luckily our transition from lessons on the structure of atoms to the complex world of Higgs Boson particles was incredibly smooth. On our first day, very little physics was taught to us besides the basics of what the Hadron Collider actually did. Instead, we focused on the site itself and were introduced to HTML something that I had never learned before. Luckily I was caught up on the basics of it extremely quickly and was sent off to work the same day. The first assignment we had was to begin to translate the website into French so that more people could readily access the data. On our first day, we were working slower and only managed to translate two pages in full. However, because we were allowed to work at our own pace, it never felt like we were rushed to complete our tasks.
On Tuesday, we began to go more in-depth with the concepts of CERN and the programming. Instead of just translating what had already been written we transcribed a presentation on Jet particles. Because we were working closer to HEP but still didn’t have an excellent understanding of it, Arturo gave us several in-depth explanations of how some of these concepts worked. Through a series of videos and real-time talks I feel that I learned an incredible amount about the CERN scientific community for the amount of time I spent working with them. As we progressed through the assigned work our programming skills also progressed.
Wednesday was the day where we began to run into issues within our code. As our capabilities increased our ambitions also became larger. We began to try and add more complex structures to the site and with that came the frustration of figuring out why it wasn’t working. The issues ranged from forgetting a simple piece of code to forgetting to add files to the repository. While annoying in the moment, each mistake was fixed and explained to us by Arturo and helped to greatly improve our coding skills.
As the week closes and we begin to move back to our normal lives, both of us still hope to be allowed to stay in contact with the people that helped us at CERN and be allowed to continue to contribute to the project. We’ve taken a lot away from this project, some of it in the form of knowledge pertaining to coding and HEP, but more importantly knowledge about how the workplace and how our lives will change after we graduate. Forming connections and learning things that are simply impossible to learn by just sitting in a classroom are the true benefits of projects like this. Instead of just sitting down and listening we act and learn by example and through our own mistakes.
The Atlas Open Data project has given us an opportunity that I wouldn’t have even thought possible last year and has provided an opportunity not only to expand my knowledge but for me to grow into a different person. A person who is significantly more prepared for the unsheltered life outside of school and will be forever grateful for the work and knowledge I’ve gained here. So in conclusion we would like to express our thanks to all the people at CERN who have taught us so much and we hope to be able to come back and keep on building up the project.
