During the summer CERN turns into one of the most international and lively places you could ever imagine as hundrends of Summer Students arrive every year from all over the world. Students with different backgrounds spend a few weeks working with their supervisors on numerous topics in scientific research. 

This year 280 summer students from 83 different countries took part in the CERN summer student programme. This programme has been running since 1962 and invites students studying physics, computing and engineering to take part in the day-to-day work of CERN’s experiments and to grow their own projects over the course of 8 to 13 weeks. Among this year's summer students you will meet an astronomer, a biochemist, computer scientists and engineers! These are young scientists with an incredible amount of talent, intelligence and full of energy. They all have an eye for scientific research but also a sharp view for tackling new challenges. 

Through the intensive programme the students work side-by-side with experts in their field of study. As well as working closely with their supervisors, the students benefit from lectures on a range of topics in the fields of theoretical and experimental particle physics and computing. The organizers had prepared a rich and diverse programme of activities in order to offer the students an unforgettable experience. It included lectures as well as hands on practice; therefore providing extensive scientific expertise. 

Moreover, a poster session took place, where students were able to present their work. Students also shown great enthusiasm for the CERN Summer Student Webfest and worked in teams to design and develop apps that encourage the public to learn more about CERN, the LHC and particle physics as well as a number of humanitarian posters linked to the work done in the UN. The students also had the chance to deliver a ten-minute lecture on their work project. Finally, every participant is expected to produce a report, describing their experience of their project work at CERN. 

The Summer Student Programme is organized by the HR team. who start working already from October each year and ends when the last students leave at the end of the following September. Applications are considered and validated from October to the application deadline, usually at the end of January. Assessing over 1500 applications is quite a task! And that’s just for students coming from the Member States while in the last years a different strand for students from the Non-Member States has been developed. 

The NMS Summer Students Programme constitutes an important part of CERN's policy of promoting greater global integration in particle physics. According to Emmanuel Tsesmelis, the coordinator of the Programme, many former NMS summer students have gone on to bright careers in science and they have often facilitated scientific collaborations between CERN and their countries.The NMS Summer Students Programme is financed only partly by CERN while dditional funding is provided by the governments and universities of the Non Member States as well as from other external sponsors. These are crucial for the continuation of the programme. 

The selections are made in March by the supervisors and the lucky students are informed in April. Contracts are prepared and sent in May and the first students start arriving in June. On each of the arrival dates the Summer Student team meets and greets the students for a brief induction session to inform them about their Summer at CERN.

In parallel to the formal programme including lectures covering a wide range of topics and the project assigned to each student; they also have the chance to visit different sites around CERN and learn more about the diversity of CERN's reserach programme. Social events are also an important aspect of the programme. Parties, barbecues, and trips in Geneva and around Switzerland are organised by the students. 

Perhaps the best summary of the experience at the end of this project is described in the words that one of the students shared just after leaving CERN: "Everything comes to an end so does this summer school for me. I learned a lot of things, physics, programming, astronomy, but the most important thing I realised was something very simple. CERN means nothing without the people working at it, I thought that the things that I will really miss will be the research at CERN and working with particle physics. But the truth is that I will really miss doing that with the people I met there. I will miss the long discussions in R1, chatting with people around the world, admiring the diversity of their culture! It was an amazing experience which I will never forget. I hope the best for all and I hope we meet again someday!". We hope that it won't be too long.

Explore the interactive map and meet some of this year's students: here