CERN Summer School

Next week marks the start of what will probably be the last CERN Summer School that Sem Carree and I have organised annually for students in the Honours Programme Delft (HPD). TU Delft is discontinuing the Honours Programme due to declining numbers, high dropout rates, the shrinking number of courses, and faculties withdrawing from the initiative.

That it is also a welcome budget cut is left unsaid, as is the egalitarian argument once voiced by a member of the Executive Board: “we no longer want to distinguish between students”. By all means, let’s deny that, alongside many average students, there are also very intelligent and very dim ones. A Gaussian distribution cannot conveniently be erased by noble intentions.

In September 2018, I received an email from Romy Welschen: ‘I’m a student from 3mE and for the past year I’ve been working at CERN in Geneva, designing a part for the Proton Synchrotron’. She had been in close contact with Markus Nordberg, the Director of IdeaSquare, who was eager to see multidisciplinary student teams from TU Delft come to CERN to develop new applications for technologies originating from physics research. Romy asked me whether I was interested in participating.

Did Ernest Hemingway like whisky? Bullseye. To provide the much-needed creative perspective, we approached industrial designer Sem Carree, and we jointly organised the first HPD/CERN Summer School in 2019. The programme works as follows: 25 students attend evening lectures over a period of six weeks, then spend three full days developing their ideas, after which they travel to Geneva to complete their projects during a week at IdeaSquare (motto: Licence to dream).

On the final Friday, the students present their work in CERN’s largest restaurant, which everyone is welcome to attend. After this pilot, six more Summer Schools took place which also involved students from other universities: the University of Amsterdam and the Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, and last year ESADE Business School and Polytechnico Valencia in Spain.

CERN: ‘Wow, amazing, fantastic’ or ‘aaahhh, difficult, scary’

Interest in our Summer School remains undiminished, but attracting the right students is harder than one might expect. The reason lies in that magical acronym: CERN. For science and engineering students, CERN means elementary particle physics striving to understand the origins of the universe – wow, amazing, fantastic! For creatively-inclined and business-oriented students, CERN means: elementary particle physics striving to understand the origins of the universe – aaahhh, difficult, scary!

Even though we explain very clearly that in Geneva we are not going to search for new elementary particles but explore everyday applications of highly advanced technologies, the message is surprisingly hard to get across. Scientifically-gifted students are sometimes disappointed that they must apply their brilliant minds to something as mundane as ‘innovation’. Creatively-gifted students, meanwhile, are relieved to discover that the challenge is not understanding how a new technology works, but imagining what can be done with it. Fortunately, by the end of the programme everyone is extremely satisfied and looks back on a fantastic journey.

We seriously considered changing the title of the Summer School to Mowing Lawns at CERN, simply to shake students loose from their fixation on fundamental physics, and make them realise that the challenge is to come up with innovative applications for a technology that can, for example, measure movement with an accuracy of a few femtometres. Which is, of course, very useful and practical for … uhh … uhm.