Home Stretch
Last week was spring break and my wife and I made a trip back to Kentucky to see our new nephew. I finished what I wanted to finish before leaving and was able to leave it all behind for the entire week. It was a nice breather, but it’s over now. Waiting for me back in Chicago were (in addition to a few inches of snow) a LARC assignment, a write-on competition for the IP Journal, and of course a bunch of reading.
The summer break is almost here, but before that gets here I have to deal with a big trial brief and three finals. I feel good about where I am, and I’m sure the next few weeks will fly by, but that is a lot of work to do before it is all said and done. Time to dig back in. I’ll see you on the other side.
Law School News
The most exciting news is that I found summer work. After no luck out on the general summer job market, I received an offer to work as a research assistant for one of the Intellectual Property professors at DePaul. As much as I have enjoyed research so far in my legal writing course, I think this will be even more fun, because his work focuses on areas in which I am very interested: e-commerce law, copyright and fair use. It’s an exciting opportunity and I can’t wait to get started.
In other news, I am considering applying for the joint J.D./M.S. degree program. I spoke with a recent graduate who went through it and recommends it highly. It got me thinking. The downside would be an additional year of school. (Though, if the job market doesn’t turn around quickly, another year out of circulation wouldn’t hurt.) The upside would be that I would become eligible to take the Patent bar, and would theoretically be more employable upon graduation.
Another factor pushing me in that direction is my newly rediscovered enthusiasm for school. Having spent a good seven years out of school and in the working world, I came to law school with a renewed enthusiasm. I have always enjoyed learning, so it’s not terribly surprising that I would be having this much fun. But I never thought that I’d be so enthusiastic that I would be considering going for another degree. As recently as the summer before law school started I had no interest in the joint degree program.
I haven’t made up my mind yet, but I’m going to talk to the people who run the program to find out if I will be a good fit. I’ve got a couple of months to decide, and as the recent past has illustrated, anything can happen in a couple of months.
RIAA Layoffs
As a music junkie, I find myself indulging in a bit of schadenfreude over this story. I have nothing but sympathy for the workers losing their jobs, but I can’t help but grin when I read the quote ” The ‘RIAA as you know it is probably history by Tuesday of next week.’” Lets hope that if the RIAA does in fact collapse, that something smarter and more beneficial to artists rises from the ashes.
