In our collaboration (CMS), every institution involved is required to do a certain number of shifts watching the detector, making sure it runs smoothly while recording data. The number of required shifts depends on the number of members in the institution’s group, and it’s up to each group to split up the work among their members as they wish.
For example, this means that if a professor doesn’t want to do shifts, their scientists, post-docs, or students must do them.
One complicating factor is that not every shift is worth the same. The least popular shifts, or the ones “harder” to do – like overnight shifts – are worth more than others.
Here’s how many points each shift is worth in our collaboration:
- Weekday morning shift (7am-3pm) is 0.75 points
- Weekday afternoon shift (3pm-11pm) is 0.75 points, and
- Weekday overnight shift (11pm-7am) is 1.5 points.
- Weekend shifts add extra +0.5 points to above.
And since we are asked to do 24-points worth of shifts in a year, what kind of shift is most attractive to me, an unmarried, childless, young graduate student?
The weekend-overnight shifts, of course! At 2-points each they’re pretty attractive.
Sometimes you have to take the shifts you can get, however, so I’ll be do weekday overnight shifts starting tomorrow.
Control room for the CMS detector.
Tags: control room, student life
