A post from student blogger Nicole

We all love this time of year.  The temperature is dropping but it’s not too cold yet, and our favorite holiday is approaching.  Halloween.  How many of you out there love haunted houses?  The excitement, anxiety, fear.  Who doesn’t love a good scare!  And don’t get me started on trick or treating!  This holiday makes me a kid again.  But this is also the time of year when you realize it’s pretty much November already!  When did this happen? I feel like we just started!

So let me slow things down a bit to compare this great holiday with patent law.  I imagine being a patent agent will be like trick or treating.  You will be working on all kinds of inventions and every now and then you will hit the jackpot and write a patent for a very interesting invention.  Similar to trick or treating you go from house to house looking for candy and you hit the mother lode.  A house giving out the big sized candy bar.  That was the jackpot house.  But I also assume that as a patent agent you will work on inventions and other tasks that you enjoy.  Similar to that one piece of candy that you find way better than any other kind and you love to get it.  But I don’t really know what to expect when I finally start working in the real world.  It will be unpredictable just like a haunted house.

I also see being a patent agent as a type of costume.  When you tell people you’re going to grad school for Patent Law they usually ask how long is the program and you say it’s only a year.  They look at you in disbelief.  “How can you get a law degree in one year?”  And my response is “Well you see, I have an engineering background and the program is a master of science so technically it’s not the usual law degree, and I will become a patent agent verses a patent lawyer.”  They still really have no clue what I’m talking about until I say I will help people get patents without a law degree.  As simple as that.  I receive the more understanding “Ohh, okay” after I tell them that simple sentence.  So this leads me to believe that as a future patent agent I am really just a patent lawyer in disguise; I am a patent lawyer without the law degree.

But back to this time flying by!  I didn’t think about it as much in the beginning of the semester because I was still settling in, but now I know what the teachers were saying.  They called it from the beginning of the semester and now I believe them.  Soon I’ll be writing my last blog and be heading out into the real world before I know it!