Excerpt from an essay on attending a summer school in Cargèse, Corsica, France.

As an undergraduate, I had worked with two professors and two graduate students on a fledging research direction motivated by the new realms that the LHC would probe and the exquisite precision of the data it would produce.  This was fall 2006, still a few years before the LHC would turn on in earnest, but unfortunately progress on the project suffered from several competing destructively-interfering effects.  The senior professor was highly-esteemed but had little time for day-to-day work, the junior professor was engaged, but was secretly hunting for jobs elsewhere, and us three students were very young, and lacked perspective or a broad picture of the project.  I did some simple calculations and others performed some simulations, but nothing materialized into something worthy of a paper by the time I graduated, and I moved on, distracted by all of the trappings of graduate school.  Then, early in 2008, a group of researchers from the UK and France published a short, simple paper presenting a novel technique for analyzing the data of the LHC, a method for discovering undiscovered particles.  This was it, this was the paper that we had been trying to write, but failed because we were out of sync or inexperienced.  This paper changed the playing field, re-imagining what could be possible at the LHC.  Searches for new particles that had been abandoned were now re-evaluated and an entirely original research direction was initiated that eventually infiltrated every aspect of the scientific program at CERN.  It was humbling to realize that in some sense I had been so close to being a key player in a major revolution, but at the same time acknowledging that there had still been so many pieces I had missed that there was no way I could have assembled the puzzle.