I am a student from China. I first saw the information of the CERN summer student program in my university’s website. Since some of my teachers and my fellow students who had helped me with my bachelor’s thesis have worked or are working at CERN I felt interested and treid to find out more. I have done some work on the H->ZZ->4l analysis and I wanted to learn more. I couldn't find a place better than CERN.

 

I am now working in the CMS group as a summer student. This project focuses on the analysis of Higgs->gamma gamma, and my job is first to see the difference between the distribution of gamma or jets which decay from Higgs from vbf and those from gg fusion, and then to use the TMVA to separate those two sources. The final goal is to set up the cuts in which we obtained more Higgs from vbf while having less events from gg fusion.

 

My experience at CERN is very close to what I expected: first going through the tutorial, then practice it in real code, then use my own things to analysis the data, meeting supervisor few times a week to report my work progress and to get further instructions.

 

 

The summer in Switzerland is much better than that in China, for the temperature in China at this time is about 37 centigrade. In comparison, the summer here is really cool and I enjoyed it very much. We don’t need to work during the weekend, we could go to outside the see the scene of Europe. Here is very different from China, people here are few, we don’t have to squeeze in the bus, the buildings here are short, the cars here will wait for people. In Geneva, I saw the people celebrate the festival and hold the music party in a whole street.

 

I’ve learned a lot in this summer, not only about code writing, but also some methods for doing data analysis. The people here are also very open-hearted. For instance, my Italian supervisor is so nice that he patiently explain the knowledge to me, and I will never forget the heavy beard on his face. As a Chinese, I could not enjoy the cold food and chips here, so I, with another Chinese fellow, went to Carrefour to buy the food to cook for ourselves. It is the first time that I cooked though the taste was not so good, I would never forget this precious experience. Thanks CERN for giving me the opportunity to practice and I feel that I have gained many things during these few weeks.