The word freedom is gaining weight and interest these days. It is a very common term, but it is not a well defined concept. Many people think that freedom is just doing what you want. Roberto, a mechanical engineer who has been working at CERN for eight years, does not agree. “That is not really freedom. To have the opportunity to develop yourself, to make your own decisions and, with them, perhaps, to make mistakes, that is mostly freedom”, he states.

It was in September 2012, a few months after the Higgs Boson was observed, that Roberto became a CERNie. He is part of the Handling Engineering (HE) Group, internally known as “the people from the transport”, because they are in charge of all the equipment used to transport a wide variety of objects: from huge unconventional shaped pieces to extremely delicate detector parts.

In particular, Roberto takes care of the overhead cranes which are inside almost all CERN buildings. They are as yellow as the sunflowers that surround this large lab in the summer months. And what do these cranes have to do with physics? one might ask. Perhaps not much, but without them, the handling and transportation of essential components of the accelerators would not be possible. And without accelerators there are no experiments. No discoveries.

This is, more or less, how Roberto tried to explain to his mother why he was moving to the other side of the Mont Blanc, the one that looks so beautiful in the mornings on his way to work by bike.

For Roberto, who comes from a country with a great artistic tradition like Italy, beauty is anything that leads to astonishment. Something that really shakes your soul. Something that, when you experience it, you feel is hard to breathe. A song, a landscape, a Botticelli’s painting… We have so many examples around us that we only have to be prepared to recognize beauty.

Besides the family and friends he grew up with, Roberto misses the smell of the typical food of his region and the medieval essence that characterizes Corridonia, his hometown, located in central Italy. “Everyone is probably a little attached to the roots, to the origins”, he believes, but over the years, Roberto has become accustomed to live outside Italy.

Although it is not far from here, our current circumstances make it difficult to travel there as often as before. That may be why Roberto now dreams of taking a four or five week road trip around the United States. “Anche il parassita vive, in natura, con puro inarrestabile slancio”, says a verb from Gaia Danese. The present time has turned the plans we had to postpone into dreams.

This Italian poet also wrote that she began to suspect that “la chiave stia nel sangue freddo”. Perhaps that is what is needed now. For Roberto, being cold-blooded seems to be the best way to solve problems, at work and outside it. “Just stay calm and try not to be too impatient to react”, he explains.

It is time to take distance and let everything cool down. Everything but the dreams, the freedom and the yellow overhead cranes.

Irene García Obrero / CERN 2020

A global pandemic has frozen Charly’s dream. This French civil engineer was supposed to go travelling with no expiration date, but because of the Coronavirus outbreak in March 2020 that dream is still on stand-by.

Charly has shrunk his travel destinations for now, and after a 2-weeks hike in the Alps, and before going to the Dolomites (Italy), he is inaugurating the summer in Geneva (Switzerland). His biggest voyage started there, 4 years ago, when Charly became a CERNie.

Last February, he left CERN. He was part of the Site Management and Building Department, in the civil engineering team of the HiLumi Project, and he was always surrounded by construction plans and designs.

When he arrived it was the beginning of the design phases and the submission of the building permits. He worked together with the different consultants, advising them during all the design phases. He also participated in defining the details of the infrastructure needed for the project in collaboration with other services of CERN. Since 2018, when the construction started, Charly was in charge of following the works in the real dealing of the shafts in the tunnels. Sometimes, his office was underground, circled by beauty and interesting facts about geology. 

He remembers fondly the fact of being given plenty of responsibility from his managers, and the confidence they put on him. He also remembers the CERN Open Days, when thousands of people came to gain first-hand knowledge about this huge lab. They were asking Charly and his colleagues about physics, and it was funny and curious how a group of civil engineers tried to resolve their physics doubts. Those colleagues are now what he misses the most from his days as a CERNie.

Charly has started looking for his next job, being sure that he would like to move a bit more closer to the environmental field. To know when it will be the start of his next professional experience is still a mystery. First comes the dreams.

As the French Romantic poet, Victor Hugo, wrote: voyager, c’est naître et mourir à chaque instant, and Charly still has a lot to revive.

Although the COVID-19 outbreak seems to be taken from a surrealist film, Charly’s adventures as a backpacker around the Globe will also seem it, but much better because they will be for real.

Irene García Obrero / CERN 2020

Almost for two years, Paula, a restless and curious woman from Gijón, worked at CERN, that laboratory that keeps beauty hidden tens of meters underground. It was one of the primal incorporations of HiLumi, and she was part of its technical project management department.

This was Paula’s first work experience. She had studied a degree in Engineering of Industrial Technologies at the University of Oviedo (Spain), studying the last year in Berlin (Germany), with an Erasmus scholarship. It was also where she began to find her path because, for her, CERN is a fantastic place to create your own adventure. Now, from Boston (USA), where she has been almost a couple of years, Paula remembers with special affection the two hobbies that accompanied her in Geneva: basketball and classical music.

As during her childhood and adolescence she lived with the court and baggy equipment, as soon as she arrived at CERN, she joined a basketball team, the Meyrin Basket, where she spent the first trainings and games lost in translation. Along with this sport, classical music. Paula, who played viola at a professional level since she was a little girl, joined l’Orchestre des Nations, where different nationalities and families of instruments were mixed.

Basketball gave her, in addition to triples and DOMS, a formidable level of French. Music, in addition to concerts and harmony, brought her a rhythmic love. In the orchestra, Paula met Matt, her current fiancé, who at that time was also doing her PhD at CERN.

In such a special place, where she believes that there are amazing opportunities to look for and to pursue, Paula realized that she wanted to direct her career towards management. Along with her mentor, a great friend and ally, she set her future plans and professional goals.

That is why, after her time at CERN, Paula flew to Madrid, where she worked for two years at McKinsey & Company, an American consultancy firm, of which, at the end of this summer, she will again be part. This time, from across the pond. To join her more technical profile in the field of management, Paula did a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Harvard, which she has just successfully completed.

From that shore of the Atlantic, Paula dreams of dedicating her training, time and effort to sustainability. She believes that the great problem in our society is that we are taking over the world we live in, so she would love to reverse the situation by taking advantage of emerging technologies. This summer, before rejoining as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company, she is collaborating with Peace of Meat, a Belgian startup that, like Paula, is committed to feed the world differently, while protecting the environment.

Paula will continue to contribute grains and grains of sand so that we have a healthier world. She will keep shaping her career and composing her life with sheet music for violin and viola. And she will not forget her experience as a CERNie, which will always sound like Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.

Irene García Obrero / CERN 2020