As a husband and father, balancing laboratory life and personal life is an ongoing juggling act. Experiments requiring a typical workday somehow stretch an extra 2-3 hours, straining time with family. When my son wakes up with a fever, and my wife cannot miss work, I have to lean on my labmates to attend to my cultures until I arrive. Having an empathetic principal investigator (PI) and supportive colleagues are tremendous assets. Once I decided to intern in the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT), I needed careful planning to prevent my juggling act from becoming a circus. Before considering an internship outside of the lab, you need permission from your PI, of course. Essentially, you are convincing your “boss” to continue paying you a full-time salary with potentially reduced on-site presence. If your PI requires a set number of hours per week, plan on extended work days or weekends to make up the difference. Some PIs merely want results; in this case try to meet regularly with your PI and proactively share pertinent data to reassure them that you are productive. Each of our interns maintains a unique schedule that pairs well with their laboratory schedule. We aim for 6-10
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Interns: Jumping Over the Language Barrier
Recently a friend asked me about my experience in the tech transfer office. In particular she was concerned with the language; English is not our first language. It reminded me of the days before I applied for my internship. After 3 months in the office I would like to share some of my personal experience about the language barrier. My adventure started with drafting technology briefs, which was the first project I was taught to do. In order to write a good tech brief, I need to know not only the invention itself but also the whole area, so that I can properly position the technology in the market. Therefore, it requires reading a lot of material that is outside my expertise. In addition, tech brief, as the name indicates, is supposed to be succinct but informative, which makes word-choosing very important because every word counts. However, the most difficult part is neither of the above; it is determining whether a scientific term, such as monoclonal antibody, should be considered ‘technical jargon’ or ‘well-accepted common sense.’ This is challenging and it does take time to improve. After a few tech briefs, I found the best way to learn is to
Continue readingInterns: The Job Hunt
As someone who very recently went through the interview process for licensing positions, I hope this blog will be of use to current and future interns. Here are my thoughts on the whole process … Get as much experience as you can The Emory OTT internship program is unpaid. While I’m sure there are mixed feelings on this, I think it is a great idea. It helps identify quickly who is genuinely interested. I dove in headfirst and put in as many hours as I could in the office, learning as much as I could. I read other peoples’ tech briefs, drafted my own, did market research, learned how to use Inteum (our database), learned the basics of patent law, attended as many meetings as possible, and networked like crazy. Through this, I was able to do some part time work for other groups and broaden my skill set even more. All of this was very useful come interview time. Get started early I asked a lot of people how early I should start applying for jobs, and I heard anywhere in the range of 3-9 months before you are ready to start a new licensing position. For me, it
Continue readingWhy Have an Intern Blog?
We are pleased to have a section in our blog dedicated to interns and would like to kick off this experiment. Why have an intern blog? We hope to convey the value of their experiences in the program and contributions to the process of supporting Emory’s technology transfer goals. These posts will be written by our interns with an eye towards other interns and individuals interested in looking “under the hood” of an academic tech transfer program. Periodically, one of the interns will chat about: their personal experiences offer or seek career advice raise awareness of tech transfer’s role in society act as an interactive networking resource A little background – our program formally launched in 2006 and was set-up to give them a taste of careers outside the research lab. It was established, and continues today, as a volunteer program. While we strive to make their time here a valuable learning experience for them they also make valuable contributions to the activities of the office. To date more 40 interns have passed through the program. They have been as varied as the people themselves from patent law, business development, banking, academic tech transfer and to plain, old fashioned curiosity.
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