Searches with early data at CMS

This paper presents an overview of prospects for searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model with early data of the CMS experiment, at the Large Hadron Collider of CERN. The results presented here are based on Monte Carlo simulations of the CMS detector, assuming 10-100~pb$^{-1}$ of collected integrated luminosity and proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 7$~TeV. A selection of benchmark analyses feasible with early data is discussed, including searches for new physics in the di-jet and dilepton+jets channels, the description of techniques to identify the production of heavy long-lived charged particles, and the searches for Supersymmetry in the all-hadronic and like-sign dilepton channels.