Careers 2022

Physicists in the public sector have many roles, including predicting the weather; designing and building nuclear energy reactors; and illuminating the three-dimensional structure of proteins, such as those from SARS-CoV-2. Among the many government jobs that physicists and physical scientists are well qualified for is evaluating patent applications at the US Patent and Trademark Office. (For more on patent work, see Physics Today, October 2017, page 36.)

After obtaining her PhD in physics in 2007, Jami Valentine Miller began doing just that, and she found it such a good fit that she’s been there ever since. In addition to her work at the patent office, she founded the African American Women in Physics organization. (See Valentine Miller’s commentary, “Celebrating and supporting African American women in physics,” Physics Today online, 29 May 2019.)

Valentine Miller recently spoke to Physics Today as part of our annual careers issue about her government career and its satisfying work–life balance. (The opinions stated herein are Valentine Miller’s alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the US Patent and Trademark Office, the US Department of Commerce, or the federal government.)

PT: Tell us about your early life.

VALENTINE MILLER: I’m originally from Philadelphia, and I went to an underserved public vocational-technical high school where everyone worked toward a trade. I was on a college-bound track, and I knew I needed a scholarship. I participated in weekend programs for kids who were interested in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics], so I knew I was going to major in some kind of STEM field. I noticed that a lot of people were majoring in engineering. And so just from a statistical standpoint, I thought I’d have a better shot at getting a scholarship if I majored in physics as opposed to engineering. I was right. I ended up getting a full-ride scholarship to Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. That’s what started me on the physics track. When I wanted to switch majors, the university said, “You’re gonna lose your scholarship if you do that.” That’s part of the reason I stayed in physics.

After I graduated from FAMU, I went on to Brown University in Rhode Island. I completed a master’s there, but I wasn’t able to pass the qualifying exams. So I reapplied to grad schools. I landed at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which was a better fit for me, because Baltimore is very similar to Philadelphia. I felt more comfortable there. As you may already know, I was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in physics at Johns Hopkins.

As I got close to finishing, my adviser told me that he would not let me schedule a dissertation defense if I didn’t have a job. At that time, the patent office was hiring in huge numbers. They pretty much doubled their workforce in that 2006–07 time frame; they were hiring around 100 new examiners a month. No experience was expected (because they’re the only patent office), they accepted almost any STEM major, and they offered eight months of paid training. I said okay, I’m going to take this job, and then I’ll wait for these postdoc offers to come rolling in.

But it turned out that the patent office was the perfect fit for me. I get to see new inventions, I get to use my technological background, I get the flexibility that’s almost like a grad student’s work schedule. And even though they can’t give big buckets of money like industry can, they can give a tremendous quality of life and work–life balance. I’ve been there ever since. It’s been 16 years.

PT: Were you originally interested in academia, or did you know that you wanted to do something else?

VALENTINE MILLER: I kind of expected that I would go the traditional route and do a postdoc. But I saw how hard particularly the underrepresented minority professors had to work with all of the additional labor of being on committees—you know every committee needs a minority—and helping student organizations. And here I am a double minority. I watched them stress and burn out. I did not want to go into academia.

Additionally, even though I’m an accomplished physicist, even now there are those who think I got my physics PhD only because I’m a Black woman. I didn’t want to have to fight that fight every single year, proving that I was highly qualified and that I wasn’t there just because of some affirmative action policy. I don’t get any of that negativity over in the government, because we really do reflect the diversity of the American population.

PT: How was the transition from Johns Hopkins to the patent office?

VALENTINE MILLER: That first year felt almost like the recovery from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. In the government, our standard is what is reasonable, whereas at a top research institution, the standard is that you’re supposed to know everything. You’re supposed to know things that haven’t even been invented yet. If there’s a question someone asks you, you should have the answer. And if you don’t, you’d better have that answer tomorrow. In the government, we say things like “Well, you know, reasonable minds can disagree,” or “We can’t do it all.” It was shockingly different.

I have one funny story. I was working in the afternoon, it was getting close to five, and a supervisor says to me and my colleagues, “You guys can go to happy hour.” And I say, “Oh, you know, I’m gonna stay a little later so I can finish up this case.” (I’m an overachiever.) And he says, “No! You are in a collective bargaining agreement. You are not allowed to do voluntary overtime. You must go. Go to happy hour.” I was stunned. This is not what I was used to. But it gave me an insight into having that balance. You can work hard, and you can also enjoy your life.

PT: How do you use your physics skills in your job?

VALENTINE MILLER: All examiners have to have a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field. We get patent applications for anything under the sun. A new examiner gets put where the need is. Some submitted applications won’t be examined for a year, and some take as long as three years. We might need to hire more people who understand AI [artificial intelligence] or computer science because those applications are increasing right now.

They put me on semiconductor devices, which is great. That’s a good fit. But my graduate research was on MRAM—magnetoresistive random-access memory. So as time has gone on, I’ve been able to focus my docket on mostly MRAM cases, which is an outstanding fit. I have some colleagues who mentioned that they took one class in audiology, and now they’re stuck looking at speakers all day long. So it’s not always fun, but it’s usually a good technological fit, because they match your expertise to what the needs of the office are.

PT: What’s the rhythm of the job?

VALENTINE MILLER: It’s one examiner per patent, so I can work at my own pace. My day-to-day looks like this: I pick up an application, and an application really looks like a journal article. It’s got an abstract, drawings, a description, and at the end it has a set of claims. I read through everything. I understand what it is that the applicant has invented. Next I examine the claims and give them the broadest reasonable interpretation. Then I search to see if I can find a reference that anticipates or obviates those claims. Is the invention really new? Or is it just an improvement on something else that’s already out there?

I spend most of my day searching, scouring the internet, looking through all the patent documents, looking at the arXiv preprint server, and checking to see if the work has been done before. If you make your invention public, you have a year to get to the patent office to file your application, so I also check to see if the inventor has filed before the deadline. Sometimes we find, especially with early-career physicists, that they put their work on a preprint server, and so the invention is made public in that way. This might preclude them getting a patent.

PT: Are you allowed to say anything about particular patents you’re working on now?

VALENTINE MILLER: Well, I can tell you about my most famous patent. It was an LED on a post. The company was called LuxVue. And I was like, “I don’t know why you’d want to do this, but it has not been done before,” so they got a patent. The next year Apple buys LuxVue and opens a manufacturing facility in California so that they can build their own LEDs on these microposts that wiggle so that if you drop your Apple Watch, you don’t lose pixels in your display. So part of the Series 5 Apple Watch included a patent that I examined. There are hundreds of patents in an Apple Watch, but at least one of them was one I examined.

PT: Is the patent office hiring now?

VALENTINE MILLER: I’m not a hiring manager, and I can’t speak on behalf of the office. But we are the American engineer’s and scientist’s safety net because we will hire you when you’re fresh out of college. We will hire you when you’re retired and just want a little part-time something. So if you’re a citizen, we are almost always hiring.

The thing that trips people up, particularly for physicists, is that the job title may not be what you think it should be. My job title is electrical engineer. I don’t have any degrees in electrical engineering, but the technology overlaps. So I’ve been examining electrical engineering patent applications for 16 years. I would say to young people or to people who are considering applying, look at what the job wants you to do and the qualifications, the things that you need to know. Don’t get hung up on the job title—it may not say “physicist,” but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it.

All government jobs go through the USA Jobs website. I recommend opening an account and putting in some keywords for the types of jobs that you’re interested in. Once a week, they’ll send you an email with any relevant job listings that have come up.

PT: What aspects of the job are different from academia?

VALENTINE MILLER: Well, I think the best part that I take full advantage of is the telework policy. I’ve been teleworking from sunny Florida for more than 10 years. I’m almost never required to go to DC, and I also have flexibility within my workweek. As long as I put in 80 hours every two weeks, they’re happy with me. So I can take time out to go on my son’s school trip. Or I can go to the gym at 9:00am and come back and work at a different time. There are also nice retirement benefits. They match up to 5% on your retirement account. There’s a small pension portion and lots of other benefits too.

Every two weeks, each examiner’s completed cases are counted. I’m supposed to examine one case every 10 hours. So in an 80-hour work week, I need eight cases; that’s 100%. If, over the course of six months, I average 107%, I’m eligible for a promotion. So if you’re someone like me—when I got here, I really wanted to get every promotion as quickly as possible—then what you need to do is really clearly laid out. You’re not competing with anyone else. There’s an unlimited number of promotions. If you’re able to do the work at a high level, you can get promoted. So in that way, you’re able to design your own career trajectory.

PT: It sounds like you really like working at the patent office.

VALENTINE MILLER: I do. But I recognize that it’s not for everyone. One of the things that challenge some people is that you really do have to manage your time. If you’re not staying on top of making sure that you’re getting enough cases done, it can become a problem. Some people wait until the last minute and get all stressed out.

I’ve wooed a number of physicists to the patent office, and some of them have left. They didn’t like the feeling that it’s not “real science.” Because you’re not in a lab, you’re not inventing or producing something yourself. You’re watching other people play and have fun. And you also can’t ask questions. We have to just take it as it is on the paper and evaluate it from there. For some people it’s just not a good match.

PT: Do you have any other advice for students considering careers outside academia?

VALENTINE MILLER: I do. One thing that I want physicists to know that I didn’t know is that the field of intellectual property is open to them because they have a physics degree. I didn’t know that the law school entrance exam is a Boolean logic exam and even has a section called logic games. Physicists tend to do really, really well on the LSAT, and scholarships for law school do exist. The patent office offers tuition reimbursement for law school or grad school. So if you’re considering law or IP as a field, consider applying to law school and take a practice LSAT. You might find it’s a lot of fun. You might find that you knock it out of the park and have a whole bunch of new options available to you. I’d also like to point out the starting salaries. Patent attorneys charge hundreds of dollars an hour, and physics postdocs don’t make hundreds of dollars an hour.

There are so many options out there for physicists, but sometimes we tell ourselves we have to do physics, or that our job title should include the word physics. But you never know what your job title is going to be because the careers of the future haven’t been invented yet.