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I was a summer student at CERN in 2006, which inspired me to go on to complete a DPhil in particle physics at Oxford, before starting a career in data science. I now work as a Senior Data Scientist for Zalando, a german multinational e-commerce company, specialising in machine learning recommendation systems.
As for my summer at CERN, I still look back on it as the best summer of my life, and massively formative in terms of academic and career growth, and also in terms of the sense of possibility and inspiration it instilled in me by the world class scientists who delivered the lectures. I still have lifelong friends from all over the world that I met there, and we reunited at CERN for a 10 year reunion back in 2016. I feel very fortunate to have been able to go, as a non-member state Irish students could not avail of the usual funding and application procedure, but instead some special provisions were made so that we were able to attend.
My education in particle physics has been enormously beneficial to my career as a data scientist - having a strong fundamental understanding of statistics is vital, as well as learning the computing skills to process large quantities of data, and the ability to interpret and prove the underlying causes of patterns arising in data.
My research project that summer at CERN was in the computing department, visualising particle interactions, and I had my first taste of programming, writing software and visualising data, which is now a large component of my job. The summer program there also gave me a first introduction to research and to large-scale international research programs. Although I have since left academia, I continue to work in research, and design and manage research programs across international teams, within a commercial setting.
(Alice Lynch 2021.)
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