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.
I was doing the work that I
was supposed to complete and I took projects that were assigned to me by the
senior counsels, but I never thought to ask questions about other aspects of
the firm, such as the strategies the brand adopts to protect its intellectual
property rights both domestically and internationally, all the previous cases the
company has ever dealt with, or how any other kinds of disputes, like domain
name, employment contracts, licensing issues work. One day I noticed the other
intern was doing case briefs while flipping over a huge casebook. She told me
she asked to learn the previous trial cases and there they were, a collection
of very detailed and useful resources sitting right there in the office.
Later
I told myself, "I could have done that too" -- but I didn’t even think to ask in
the first place. You really can learn what
you want to know just by actively asking questions, by bravely communicating
with the other professionals, and by being engaging and curious, but if you
don’t, no one is going to feed you all the answers, especially when everyone is
busy.
Always
embrace an attitude of a key player of the place where you are working, instead
of being an outsider, even if you only work 20 hours per week during your
internship. Do not be shy to initiate a conversation with your officemates during a
coffee break and talk about yourself! You are creating opportunities to let
people get to know you more. You should especially not be afraid to talk about
your plans and goals, a professional team should like to work with someone who
has a clear vision about their career. Then, believe or not, people will probably
also share the story of how they got to where they are, and they might even give
you free advice if they really like you. What could be better than that? You
already have a successful model to follow!
No comments:
Post a Comment