CERN’s range of interaction becomes infinite
With over 60 years of history and more than 13,000 users from all over the world who tread the streets of its campus, CERN clearly has great potential to bring together a varied alumni community.
While at CERN, members of personnel – not just staff but also users, associates, students, fellows, and anyone who holds a contract of either employment or association with CERN – proudly feel members of a unique family, and this feeling does not stop when they leave CERN. Together, we help CERN achieve its challenging objectives. This adds to the more formal and professional opportunities to meet and develop relationships, such as meetings, workshops and conferences.
Once they leave the campus for other destinations, including other academic institutions but also retirement, industry, etc, former cernois see their bonds with CERN fade away. However, from now on, this is a thing of the past as the new CERN Alumni platform was indeed designed to allow its alumni continue having a sense of belonging and offer Alumni a powerful way to stay connected with CERN. http://alumni.cern was launched on the 8th June but the design phase started a year earlier and expressions of interest to join the network were already being collected from as early as November 2016.
To date, a few months down the line, over 1800 alumni have actively joined the network and we are striving to make the network known inside and outside of CERN. The scientific collaborations have been an integral part of the CERN Alumni Programme since its beginnings and a source of inspiration for us because they had already set up events to help their alumni develop their professional network within their circles.
Today, CERN alumni (perhaps you are one?) are distributed around the world, pursuing their careers and passions across many fields including industry, economics, information technology, medicine and finance. Several have gone on to launch successful start-ups, some of them directly applying CERN-inspired technologies. Setting up and nurturing this important network is a strategic objective for CERN management and we have enjoyed their strong support throughout the whole process.
When speaking with our alumni, in particular with physicists, we gather that the prospect of having to leave CERN may be daunting, with no guarantee that one’s professional future will offer a similar environment and possibilities. However, they also tell us that the professional experience gained at CERN has turned out to be a quality brand outside the Laboratory, and it is indeed highly sought after by employers.
Neverthless, the CERN Alumni Programme is not just about jobs and pure career development. It is also about maintaining connections, being members of the broad CERN family, giving back to the Organisation by sharing contacts, experience and knowledge with the network and having the possibility to take part in social events specially designed for them. We have made sure that, once they become members of the network, our Alumni can have access to webcasts, dedicated email forwarding (soon to come) and a small collection of special offers from selected partners that we intend to develop further.
How will the network develop? What will it become? We are aware that one of the challenges for the future of the CERN Alumni Programme is the difficulty in keeping the community engaged and motivated. Our aim is to develop the network into what the Alumni need, and would like. How do we intend to reach this goal? Alumni will be given the opportunity to become members of the CERN Alumni Advisory Board which, together with CERN Management, will design the strategic objectives of the Network. They will help us shape and nurture it. Together, we will make sure we have a lively community of motivated people who enjoy staying connected from all corners of the world, helping each other, exchange ideas, sharing CERN founding principles and taking an active part in the events we propose.
The first ever reunion event will be held on 2–3 February 2018. We are eagerly awaiting the participation of a few hundred CERN Alumni at this unique kick-off event, ‘First Collisions’, which will focus on the diversity of careers that exists beyond CERN. Inspiring speakers from a variety of fields, all alumni with previous strong links to CERN, will showcase the value of a CERN experience. Discussion forums and smaller parallel sessions will allow the participants to focus on specific themes. As always in such events, we have not forgotten to include exclusive visits to the lab’s facilities (open also to relatives) and even a ski outing. In other words, for the two days of the event, we want the alumni feel at home at CERN like they did when they were still on campus.
Are you a CERN alumnus/alumna reading this article? Don’t waste a single second and go to http://alumni.cern. We are eagerly awaiting you!