Guest post for Cylindrical Onion by Charlotte Jones, high-school student from Campion School, UK

Last week, I was lucky enough to spend an amazing week on work experience with Dave Barney of CMS, doing lots of real work including in the underground caverns of the detector!

My first experience when I arrived at CERN on Monday morning was to receive an official access card, which in comparison to my later experiences seems quite small; but seeing my photo next to the CERN symbol was definitely an exciting start. After this, I underwent several online training courses that were fairly rigorous, in order to gain access to underground areas. As part of my safety training I attended a practical course on using a self-rescue mask, which provides emergency oxygen in the event of gas leaks or oxygen deficiency in the underground working areas. It was actually a very fun course as, after we had a talk about how to put on the mask, we had to demonstrate our proficiency by putting it on under realistic conditions! In groups we entered a mock tunnel and, armed with our self-rescue masks, we set off pretending to work; however suddenly there was a gas leak and a cloud rose up. So we ran from the immediate danger and then had 40 seconds to correctly put on our masks. It was fairly intense, but a very good experience to have.

Read the rest of this post on the CMS blog, Cylindrical Onion