What Do I Have To Do To Better My Chances For An Internship?

I want to do a summer internship at CERN in the summer of 2015. I have one LOR from a professor who has a PhD from PRL, India in nuclear physics. What are my chances of getting an internship? What tips would you give me?

• Edit 1 - I still haven't done any work in the field of instrumentation. Also from what I saw it seems that CS or Electronics people have a better chance than an Electrical Engineer. I am a 3rd year B.Tech Electrical Student from India GPA is 8 currently.I have sufficient theoretical background in Astrophysics. Also is it that only folks from the Sciences Background mostly get to work at CERN..or people specializing in Electrical or any other branches(excluding Computer Science/Engineering) like Instrumentation get to work. I am asking this so as to clarify whether I need to go into theoretical or can I continue to target Masters in my field....continue in the electrical domain and still have a chance to work at CERN.

• Answer:

  To add to 's excellent answer: There are many non-physicists, including electrical engineers, working at CERN. In particular there are electrical engineers that participate in the summer student program. As a 3rd year electrical engineer, in order to get into the http://jobs.web.cern.ch/job/11258 you need: 1. Two reference letters, 2. An academic transcript, 3. A CV. For the reference letters, it doesn't actually matter where your referee got his or her PhD. However, if you can get a reference letter from someone who is currently working at CERN, or has worked there at some point, it will be much more influential than a letter by someone who has no connection to CERN. In any case, you need two reference letters and they need to be good reference letters. For the academic transcript, I don't think theoretical background in astrophysics will help you much, although it's worth mentioning in your CV. What's more important is to have good grades. That's not something you can change right now, since the deadline for applications is in 2 months, but it will give you an idea about your chances of getting into the program. (Sorry, I have no idea what a GPA of 8 means in India.) For the CV, it should describe your background, skills, research experience, goals, and perhaps most importantly, the things that will make you stand out when compared to other applicants. You should probably find out what electrical engineers do at CERN and emphasize anything relevant to that in your CV. I saw in your comments to André's answer that you would like to work on collision data. Naturally, this is not something that electrical engineers usually do. Engineers usually design, improve or build the experimental apparatus itself. The people who work on collision data are usually physicists, since this kind of work requires knowledge of the actual physics involved, and working on collision data means trying to interpret the data and find out how it supports or constrains particular physical theories. However, most summer students who work on data analysis don't really have the necessary background in theoretical physics anyway, since they're only undergraduate students, and the theoretical knowledge required is usually only learned in graduate-level courses related to particle physics. So, as a summer student, you don't need to have the theoretical knowledge in advance; if you end up working in data analysis, you'll most likely just do what your supervisor tells you to do. Still, an extremely important requirement, if this is what you want to do, is programming experience, in particular with C++ and Python. I'm a bit confused because in the question details as well as in your comments to André's answer you are asking about a choice of master's degree, which is completely irrelevant for the summer student program since you're currently a 3rd year student and as mentioned, the application deadline is in 2 months. Perhaps you're actually talking about getting a job at CERN after your master's, unrelated to the summer student program? Please clarify that so that I can give a more relevant answer.