Notre Dame’s football stadium

A post from our student blogger Roberto

The week before classes start at Notre Dame, students in the Master of Science in Patent Law program attend a week long orientation fondly known as “bootcamp”.  This week serves as an intensely focused time of reprograming your brain from your undergraduate mode of thinking to a new perspective that is necessary for success in the program.

I, for one, am extraordinarily thankful for bootcamp.  While my engineering background has many positives benefits that I am sure will serve me well in the future, the type of thinking required in this program is quite different from anything I have had before.  Bootcamp allowed me to slow down and digest this new way of attacking problems and prepare myself for the many challenges and opportunities that will come my way in the next year.

One of the many highlights from bootcamp was that we as students got to take a mock Patent Bar exam.  While I had never seen anything like it before, I am sure glad I got to sit down and have that experience before I ever set foot in one of my classes.  This gave me the chance to see first-hand what type of knowledge would be required of me upon graduation.

We also did plenty of fun activities during bootcamp including campus tours and a South Bend Silverhawks baseball game.  As a group we have diverse backgrounds and come from all walks of life.  We have PhD students, international students, as well as chemistry and biology majors just to name a few.

As you can see, it is not necessary to have an engineering background to study patent law; what is required is a natural curiosity that will drive you to understand how an invention works.

This picture was the first thing I saw when I set foot on campus for the first time as an actual Notre Dame student.

Even though it’s not bright and sunny out I love this picture.  To me, it signals the difficult times ahead and warns that the road will not be easy.  However, at the end of that journey lies the ultimate prize.  I am excited and ready to begin my first week in the MSPL and look forward to every step of that journey.