Externship/Internship Performance: Be Curious and "Loud"

By: Sindy Ding-Voorhees

This week we are pleased to present the second of three posts by guest blogger, Sindy Ding-Voorhees.  Sindy graduated from Fordham's LL.M. program in Intellectual Property and Information Technology in 2013 and has since been working as an Intellectual Property attorney in New York and Washington D.C.  She wrote this series of three articles to share her experiences and advice with our incoming LL.M. students.  This week, she addresses how to succeed in an internship/externship.  We are grateful for her contribution!

A primary goal in any internship is to complete your part of the job, diligently and actively. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you do it all by yourself, sit quietly in front of your computer throughout all your hours. You can be a hard worker as well as a great team player who is able to optimize workload, think outside the box and ASK QUESTIONS (don’t be afraid!). A smart intern will not only complete what s/he is supposed to do, but will also be CURIOUS about the other parts of the work.

                                                                                                                                          

Here is my real experience when I worked at Coach, Inc. during the first semester of my LL.M. year. Each intern was assigned a certain amount of work doing online intellectual property monitoring and enforcement. It was actually a pretty sweet position because we worked closely with the senior counsels and the General Counsel. 

Speak Up During the Year of Your LL.M.

By: Sindy Ding-Voorhees

This week we have a guest blogger, Sindy Ding-Voorhees.  Sindy graduated from Fordham's LL.M. program in Intellectual Property and Information Technology in 2013 and has since been working as an Intellectual Property attorney in New York and Washington D.C.  She wrote this blog post to share her experiences and advice with our incoming LL.M. students.  We are grateful for her contribution!

An LL.M. program for most non-U.S. candidates is something with multiple purposes. First and foremost, it is an intensive one-year long program of study covering various American substantive legal subjects. It also provides an almost exclusively English-speaking environment, which is a first for many people. Most importantly, an open, mingle-cultured (both legally and socially) society is right there, waiting to embrace you, whether or not you are prepared for it. 

I am a foreign-trained lawyer who recently graduated from the LL.M. program at Fordham Law, which is located in midtown Manhattan near Columbus Circle—not a very quiet place! In this article, I will share my experience and give you some tips on what you, as an international student, need to do to make your year the most rewarding.