Which matters most to patent law? Major or experience ? Forum

[Anonymous User]

Patent prosecution can be different re: number of hours and pay than other areas of law. You can make $120k for less than 50 hours/week as an experienced patent agent. Most attorney prosecutors I know work less than 50 hours a week most weeks and make much more than that. Also, many engineers work 45+ hours a week for much less than $100k.

To the original question, generally speaking I think major is more important. A EE/CS major with no experience will probably have an easier time finding a job than a CE, IE, or ME with experience. Type of experience would also be relevant. For example, experience developing particular types of software or mobile device batteries would probably be more valuable experience than being a maintenance engineer at a power plant.

[Anonymous User]

I would tend to agree that it might make a bigger difference for prosecution, but especially for life sciences where a Ph.D. seems to be required. But it still seems to be very important for lit. Perhaps in the golden days firms would just throw bodies at their patent lit. departments regardless of whether those bodies had technical backgrounds. Now I think firms are a little more selective about bringing in new associates, but that's just my opinion.

I had a few buddies that were EE or CS with good grades that had like 10 interviews at Loyola and got multiple summer offers. Trolling through LinkedIn and other places I still see preference for those majors. You should have lots of options if you do well.

Is it Loyola in Chicago or LA ?

[Anonymous User]

I would tend to agree that it might make a bigger difference for prosecution, but especially for life sciences where a Ph.D. seems to be required. But it still seems to be very important for lit. Perhaps in the golden days firms would just throw bodies at their patent lit. departments regardless of whether those bodies had technical backgrounds. Now I think firms are a little more selective about bringing in new associates, but that's just my opinion.

I had a few buddies that were EE or CS with good grades that had like 10 interviews at Loyola and got multiple summer offers. Trolling through LinkedIn and other places I still see preference for those majors. You should have lots of options if you do well.

Is it Loyola in Chicago or LA ?

Loyola in IP world generally refers to the Loyola Chicago interview fair where many, many firms IP groups go to hire students pre-OCI. I believe it is in July? It was pretty common among my friends that went to have at least 1 offer through it assuming decent grades/school/EE or CS background.