He was in Paris with his wife when, without knowing it, he sketched out the future. It was 2007 and this was one of his first trips abroad. Dmitry, a mechanical project engineer, told his wife, “it would be nice, one day, to come to Europe to work”.
She laughed then, but less than a year later, he was offered to join CERN. “It was a sudden opportunity. Something I did not expect because I had not even applied for any jobs”, he says. But as soon as he heard about the offer, the decision was made. He said yes.
Dmitry started to work on the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), an international project still in development. But twelve years is a long time and he has gone through several positions. He is now part of the HL-LHC project, specifically, of Work Package 13, which takes care of beam instrumentation.
He has two main roles. One is the engineering role, which involves all kinds of tasks related to manufacturing, design and purchasing. The second one is project coordination, where he is in charge of the communication because, as he explains, 90% of the project management is communication. And here comes his favourite part.
Dmitry enjoys that interaction, those pleasant collisions, with the CERNies around him. “I start my morning not by checking my emails, but by talking to people, asking them how their weekend went, how their families are doing… This is really what gives me the motivation for the whole day ahead”, he confesses.
In addition to a very diverse community, CERN also has cutting-edge technologies. Most of them are not to be found anywhere in the world, and that is very appealing for his more engineering side.
Although he has lived in this area for many years, Dmitry, who was born and raised in the Russian capital, still misses three things: family, friends and cultural life. “I would say that Moscow never sleeps, but it does from time to time, although it is not a deep sleep. Every time you go out on the street, you can find cultural events, even at three in the morning”.
In both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering, Dmitry graduated from Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU), on the banks of the Yauza, a tributary of the Moskva, the river that runs through the city. The city where Достоевский (Dostoevsky) was born, where Чехов (Chekhov) studied medicine and where Лев Толстой (Lev Tolstoy) wrote most of his novels.
Instead of dreams, because these sometimes border on the impossible, Dmitry has distant plans. He would love to take a trip by car with his wife and friends from ocean to ocean. Perhaps from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Perhaps in the United States, from San Francisco to New York.
“When something that I had been planning, or that I had had in mind for a long time, such as coming to live in Europe, becomes a reality, I am very happy. It makes me feel that I am doing the right thing, that I have chosen the right path”.
Dmitry also likes to feel when something has been done from the heart. “When someone has invested all their skills, passion and professionalism in doing something, it will always look beautiful”. Whether it is a building, components for an accelerator or a road trip, for which time is much needed.
“Getting together at least three weeks, because a trip like this does not deserve to last less, is a difficult task, and that is why organizing plans for the future is complicated. Even more in our current situation”.
But, as the Russian poet Анна Ахматова (Anna Akhmatova) wrote, “the future is known to cast its shadow long before it enters”. And “hope sings safely in the distance”.
