The Final Word on WIPO

Past week has been kind of interesting on the WIPO Internship horizon. As I wrote earlier, I was selected as one of two finalists whose names were forwarded on to WIPO for final consideration. All was well and good in the land of milk and honey. But then things went sour.

First indication of badness took the form of an e-mail from a WIPO employee who shall remain nameless. The e-mail originated from a non-WIPO e-mail address, was horrendously terse, and didn't even say whether the individual was a WIPO employee. After confirming the name was legit with my UW contact I forwarded on my resume and phone number (which she should have already had) and awaited a phone call. The call, unfortunately, came while I was indisposed in the library. So I e-mailed her that night saying I would call her at 12:30 PST and if that wasn't a good time to let me know.

Well, turns out it wasn't a good time... but she didn't bother to tell me until I called her. That resulted in a rather unfortunate conversation where I lost a lot of respect for the professionalism of WIPO. I later had my actual factual interview that included such insightful questions as "have you ever worked for an international organizations before" (uh... don't you think it would be on my resume) and "how did you learn about WIPO" (hmmm... maybe I study IP at Law School). Following the grueling interview she essentially said I wouldn't like the internship and unless I had my housing situation completely worked out that I should just let them know so they could offer the position to someone else.

Today I did just that. Having decided that going to New York for 10 weeks, unpaid, without housing, and working for what struck me as a hugely unprofessional organization who really didn't want me in the first place is not my idea of a good time. Granted, my legal career is not going to really benefit from the alternative of staying here and doing legal research (although the topic sounds cool... more on that later), but at least I won't end the summer with HUGE credit card and personal debt.

But for a brief moment there I thought something really special might have happened... but apparently it just wasn't in the cards.