A post from student blogger Nicole

The date for my final presentation is creeping up.  I am both excited and a little nervous, but I’m leaning toward being more excited than nervous.  I think this is the first time I’m actually excited to give a presentation.  I know everything about my capstone project, and I’ve learned so much during the semester so there’s nothing to be nervous about.  When we were first told to start putting our presentation together I thought to myself, wow it’s way too early to start preparing, but then I really thought about it and realized there weren’t even that many days left in the semester.  Like I said before in one of my other blogs, time really does fly during this program, especially the last month of this semester.

The tricky thing about our final presentation is the audience.  We have to present to both Karen (the director of the patent law program) and our inventor.  We have to prove what we learned throughout the semester to Karen but at the same time we have to teach our inventor the things we learned.  Chances are your inventor doesn’t actually know much about patent law.  Not every student will work with a faculty member that has worked with a past student for the program so it is important to help them understand what is going on for their invention.  Also from what I’ve heard from students that have presented already, I have to be ready for a lot of questions.  I think this is what makes me nervous, but I’m not going to let it take me down!

So for all you newbies coming into this program or deciding to become part of the program, I’ll let you know what has to go into your final presentation.  First off let me terrify you by telling you it has to be 45-60 minutes long.  Yes you read that right, 45-60 minutes.  I remember reading that in an old blog by one of the past students and thinking to myself, how the heck will I be able to talk for 45-60 minutes.  The longest I ever had to present was 10 minutes, and I thought that was asking a lot from me!  But after preparing my slides and reading through them, I realized 45 minutes might not be so bad.  There is a lot of information you have to talk about like describing your project, the search you did to see if anything else out there is similar, patent laws, and your claims.  Explaining the search conducted and anything you found that could be closely related will take up a good chunk.  Also once you find out how long your claims end up being and explaining them to your inventor, you will have plenty of things to talk about for 45 minutes.  So don’t let me terrify you too much and hopefully I didn’t scare anyone away from this program! Wish me luck on my presentation!