Well, I am almost done with my first week of work and so far it is great. So far all we have done is orientation related stuff, but tomorrow and next week we will start getting in to the knitty gritty (how do you spell that?) business of patent examination.
Just so that everyone is on the same page, this is basically how the US Patent and Trademark Office (pto) works. There are 7 Technology Centers (tc's) that all patent applications are sorted in to when received by the pto. Examples of the different TCs are communications, mechanical engineering, chemistry etc...and within each tc, there are different "art units" that are responsible for examining patents from more specific categories within the tc.
New patent examiners go through an 8 month training program called the patent training academy. As pretty much the whole world knows, the pto has an enormous backlog of patent applications. In fact, they told us that if everyone stopped submitting patents today, we would still have enough work to keep going for 3 or 4 years. In order to try and tackle this problem, they are hiring 1200 people every year until 2012. In order to teach the huge number of people how to be patent examiners, the pto has developed the patent training academy. This is an 8 month training program very similar to a college environment. We have lectures we go to every day and then smaller lab groups that are assigned to different trainers that act as our mentors and supervisors throughout the program.
My class has 70 new examiners in it, and we are divided up into 5 labs. I am in technology center 3700, which is mechanical engineering. Even though it is called mechanical engineering, it contains almost all of biomedical engineering as well. My art units is "Radiation, magnetic, light therapy, cardiovascular testing, respiratory testing". This means that all of the patents I will be examining will fall in to these categories, although I won't really start any examining until next week or the week after. I met with my supervisory patent examiner (spe) today for the first time, he seems really cool and layed back, just my style.
I am really looking forward to working here, now time to examine some patents!
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3 comments:
Thanks for the overview! So glad you are happy in your new job. Good luck in your new career.
Love, Mom
So if you run across any of my brilliant ideas, you'll approve them no questions asked, right?
I won't examine any of your crazy EE shenanigans anyway, but if I hear about one, I'll be sure to put in a good word :)
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