A post from student blogger Nicole

First things first, dates are important when it comes to patent law.  A beginner’s tip: find out all the important dates on the first meeting you ever have with a client.  Know if your client filed a provisional patent, offered their product for sale, or publically disclosed it at a conference or something similar.  Whatever you do, just remember to find out those types of dates.  These become very crucial and you don’t want something like missing a deadline to ruin your chances of getting a patent.

Well now that I got my rant out of the way I’ll tell you about my experience so far with my outside mentor.  The students in this program are given a practicing patent agent or attorney to help us write the specification for our disclosure.  They are basically giving us feedback on each section we write in order to draft a complete patent application.  Not only can we ask for their feedback but we can ask them about their jobs too.  I’ve been able to ask my mentor about his path to becoming a patent attorney and how he’s enjoyed it all these years.  I like hearing everyone’s journeys to becoming patent agents/attorneys.  I’m looking forward to receiving feedback from my mentor throughout the semester so that we can make my application unbreakable.

I also just wanted to throw in how awesome the basketball game was on Saturday.  Notre Dame had a great second half and beat UNC.  It was an extremely exciting game, and I’m glad I was able to go.  For anyone that comes into this program you should really try and go to at least one game.  The tickets are free for students and you just have to sign up when the ticket window opens.  Most of the time it turns into a lottery when a lot of students sign up, but you can get lucky and be picked!  The student section is quite the experience.  There is so much excitement and cheering and fighting Irish spirit!  It’s definitely worth it and you can even get free stuff like a shirt or colorful poms.  Who doesn’t love free stuff!