NOVEMBER 21st, 2017 – Following up on our email correspondence, we finally had the honor to visit CERN from friday the 17th of November till monday the 20th. The goal of this business trip was to further discuss our collaboration with CERN, its experiments, and departments in person. The initial planning included a meeting with the president of the CERN council, meetings with the spokespersons of both the Atlas and ALICE experiment, and a tourist tour through CERN. However, we were met with such excitement and enthusiasm that our schedule quickly filled up with more and more meetings, and we hardly had time to eat! We even received a few private tours through the experiments and its laboratories.
               Being the geeks we are, we couldn’t be happier! It was great to see everything we’ve learned and read about in real life for the first time! Accompanied by the CERN physicists that shared their passionate stories about the experiments this weekend truly was a dream come true. When Juliette noticed we walked past the famous room in which the existence of the Higgs Boson particle was officially announced to the world she instantly forgot she had a business meeting and couldn’t help but walk inside to look around in awe.

Juliette: “I cannot believe this was not even on my bucket list. This feels so monumental! *pause* *sigh* Okay, I have decided that it is now – check”.

Besides Juliette, our team this weekend consisted of Gwen, Sonia, and Pascal – who joined our team recently and works for CERN on the detectors and systems of the ALICE experiment. His main tasks are CERN communication and coordination. It was due to his proactive attitude that we got to meet so many important people this weekend.
               We ended up with a much more intensive collaboration than we had ever dared to dream of. Armed with a complete notebook filled with information, tips, contact information, referrals, and the request to keep them up to date we had to leave Geneva and CERN – exhausted but grateful – on monday morning. We would like to thank everyone at CERN for their enthusiasm and we got even more excited about ScienceTales than we already were.

Thank you for having us! Let’s make ScienceTales a project to be proud of!

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