With Knowledge Gained at BME, You Can Thrive at CERN and the World’s 10th Best University

Every year, 300–400 students have the opportunity to spend the summer working at one of the world’s most remarkable research facilities: the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) particle physics centre in Geneva. This year, two Hungarian university students were selected from more than 20,000 applicants. One of them, Lili Sebők, is a master’s student in computer engineering at BME.

Lili’s eight-week programme in Geneva has already come to an end, but we could only speak to her via Teams, as she travelled almost directly from CERN to the Far East.

She will spend the next semester at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the top-ranked university in Asia.

In the latest QS World University Rankings, NUS made it into the global top 10, surpassed only by traditional institutions in the English-speaking academic world and ETH Zurich.

“Only a week has passed, so I can’t say much about the teaching yet. But from what I’ve seen so far, there isn’t a huge difference. I’m taking courses that are quite similar to those at BME,” Lili said in response to our first question. She added, however, that she has noticed some major differences in other respects – referring to not just the banana trees growing freely along the streets, but also to the fact that her dormitory has posters explaining what to do if a monkey happens to wander into the kitchen through the window.

Nothing like that could have happened at CERN, but that doesn’t mean her two months in Geneva were uneventful. Lili worked on optimising software supporting the work of researchers and engineers at CERN, while also attending lectures on IT-related topics, on CERN’s activities and current experiments.

The main entrance of CERN (source: Wikimedia Commons)

But how did she end up at the research centre in the first place? “I heard about the opportunity from a friend who also studies at BME. She was a summer student here last year. Applications had to be submitted at the beginning of the year. There was no interview; the selection was based on motivation letters and CVs, with the applicants’ areas of interest also playing a role.”

We also asked her which of the skills and knowledge she had acquired at BME proved most useful during her summer internship. “I think, above all, it was the ability to solve problems independently and to learn new things efficiently,” she replied. “When studying abroad, having a good command of English is not necessarily enough, because it can still be difficult to follow the train of thought during lectures. At BME, among other things, I acquired such a solid foundation in mathematics that, when concepts such as eigenvectors and eigenvalues were mentioned in passing, for example, I didn’t have to think for long to connect them to what I already knew,” she added.

The control centre of CERN (source: Wikimedia Commons)

She also mentioned a specific BME project that proved particularly helpful. As part of her independent laboratory course, her supervisor, Péter Antal, involved her in an actual research project carried out jointly with Semmelweis University, focusing on the early diagnosis of endometriosis.

“This experience helped me a lot in becoming capable of working independently on a research task at CERN.”

She enjoyed the innovation-focused work she did in Geneva so much that she now feels she would like to work in a similar environment after completing her MSc. “So for now, my plan is to gain some experience in industry, try to explore several research topics in greater depth, and then, if I find something I really like, perhaps return to academia and pursue a PhD. That could be at BME or at a university abroad.”

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