What are you up to these days?
Currently, my title is Associate Director of Copyrights & Transactions at Kyndryl, Inc., the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, born from IBM’s 2021 spin-off of its Global Technical Services division. Headquartered in New York City, Kyndryl designs, builds, manages, and modernizes large-scale information systems globally for thousands of enterprise clients. The company supports critical systems for banks, airlines, retailers, and government agencies, ensuring uptime, cybersecurity, and technological agility at a massive scale. With over 80,000 employees in over 60 countries, Kyndryl is a key player in shaping how industries handle complexity, risk, and innovation.
In addition to my “day” job, I am also an adjunct professor at Lewis & Clark where I’ve supervised the Patent Pilot Program at the Small Business Legal Clinic. I’ve also coached the school’s moot court team for the National Patent Application Drafting Competition, and I’m the President of the Oregon Intellectual Property Alliance - a nonprofit that seeks to enhance the intersection of business and IP through education and networking.
How did you get your job?
It’s a long story! I graduated with a degree in cellular and molecular biology from Utah State University and spent time in a clinical reference laboratory in Salt Lake City. I was fascinated by the science behind medical testing, but the repetitive nature of lab work got to me. I was searching for something more dynamic that tapped into my interest in logic, technology, and public impact. My interest in law, and specifically in intellectual property, started when a nearby laboratory patented a breast cancer gene - something I didn’t realize was possible. Through the encouragement of friends and coworkers, I enrolled at Lewis & Clark Law School.
The first in-person interview I had after law school was with IBM, where I told them that my first family computer was an IBM 8088 and that I would stay up late fiddling with configuration files. I got the job and in my first five years, I drafted hundreds of patent applications, authored an internal patent claim drafting guide, and learned how to work at the intersection of innovation and law. Now I’m excited for my next challenge: building something new at Kyndryl. For more information about my work, please feel free to check out this article about me.
What advice would you give to a graduating student who's looking for a job?
Cast a wide net, be tenacious, and once you have an interview: you MUST stand out, so prepare, prepare, prepare. When I landed my interview with IBM, I had already applied to roughly 300-400 jobs. The hunt was tough, and there was a lot of rejection. In preparing for my interviews at IBM, I put a great deal of effort into honing and tailoring my story of growing up with an IBM computer. I did some research to identify what model of IBM PC we had, and then essentially wrote a script that would maximize my appeal. I knew I needed to underscore my experience with computers (I don’t have a computer science degree), as well as demonstrate my genuine interest in the IBM brand. I practiced responses to common interview questions to eliminate the “umms” and other filler syllables that could make me appear less professional or unprepared. I thought up logical follow-up questions and practiced answers for those, too. The preparation lowered my anxiety, enhanced my interview performance, and increased my professional “aura.” The result was a compelling story that highlighted my self-taught computer skills and illustrated that IBM was a beloved part of my formative experiences.