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Welcome to today's SCALIS EarlyCareers newsletter! 🚀

You did everything right. You built the app. You shipped the open source contribution. You wrote the newsletter, ran the small Shopify store, trained the model on your own GPU credits at 2am. That work is the reason a recruiter took you seriously in the first place, because in 2026 nobody gets hired on coursework alone.

Then the offer lands, and with it a packet. Offer letter, tax forms, direct deposit, and one document with a title like Employee Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement. You scroll, you click, you sign in ninety seconds because you are excited and it is clearly just paperwork.

That document is the most consequential thing you will sign all cycle. It typically assigns to the company every invention, discovery, improvement, design, and copyrightable work you produce during employment. The word "inventions" in these agreements is far broader than patents. It reaches code, writing, designs, and product ideas. And depending on how it is drafted and where you live, it can reach the project you built before you ever met them.

There is a specific box in that agreement built to protect you. Almost every student leaves it empty. Let's fix that before you sign anything this fall.

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Know which document you are actually signing

The offer letter is the boring one. It states pay, dates, and at-will status. The one that matters is the separate agreement covering confidentiality and invention assignment, sometimes called a PIIA or a CIIA, sometimes folded into an onboarding bundle with a generic name.

Find it before you click. Search the PDF for the words "assign," "inventions," "works," and "prior." Read those paragraphs and only those paragraphs. Pay attention to two things: whether the language says "I hereby assign" or "I agree to assign," and whether the scope is limited to work performed for the company or reaches everything conceived during the period of employment. The second version is the one that can pull in your weekends.

Your side project is the actual thing at risk

Here is the scenario that catches technical students. You spent a year building a scheduling tool. You take a summer internship at a company that also builds scheduling software. Even in the most employee friendly states, the protection for personal work carves out anything that relates to the employer's business or anticipated research. Your project sits squarely inside that carve out.

Same pattern in every field. The marketing student with a growing newsletter who interns at a media company. The finance student running a small options research site who interns at an asset manager. The closer your side project is to the employer's business, the weaker your claim gets, which is exactly the opposite of what students assume.

Fill in the prior inventions exhibit

This is the highest leverage move in this entire issue and it takes fifteen minutes.

Most invention assignment agreements include a schedule, often labeled Exhibit A or "Prior Inventions," where you list work you created before the role that you are excluding from assignment. It is almost always blank when it reaches you, and leaving it blank frequently functions as a representation that you have nothing to exclude.

So list your work. One line each: name, one sentence describing what it does, and the date you started it. Do not paste source code, credentials, or anything confidential. You are creating a dated record of what existed before day one, not handing over a technical disclosure.

Then send it back with the signed agreement and ask for a fully executed copy in return. A countersigned copy that includes your exhibit is the whole point.

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State law is a floor, not a shield

A handful of states limit how far these agreements can reach. California Labor Code section 2870 is the best known: an assignment provision cannot apply to an invention you developed entirely on your own time, without the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information, unless it relates to the employer's business or anticipated research, or results from work you did for them. California also requires the agreement to notify you that this limit exists. Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, Washington, and North Carolina have statutes in the same family.

Read those three conditions carefully, because all of them have to hold. Working on your project during lunch on a company laptop can break the first two on its own. And plenty of states have no such statute at all, which means the contract language is close to the whole story. If you are interning in one of those, the exhibit in the previous tip is doing even more work.

Your school may already have a claim on the same work

This is the part nobody warns students about, and it produces genuine conflicts. Universities publish their own student IP policies, and they do not all say the same thing.

The common shape, using Penn State's published policy as an example: work you produce in a for-credit course is generally yours, work produced in a paid research setting generally belongs to the university, and projects tied to a corporate sponsor require a specific assignment form. Kansas State's student agreement adds a point worth memorizing: students are never obligated to join a project that requires assigning their IP, and in course settings they must be offered a non-assignment option.

Now stack that on top of an internship agreement. If your internship work overlaps your funded research, or your stipend comes through the school, or your capstone sponsor is your internship employer, two parties may have claims on the same output. Dartmouth's technology transfer guidance is blunt about the fix: settle it in writing, in advance, before the work starts.

Two emails handle this. One to your school's technology transfer or research office asking whether anything you are working on carries an existing obligation. One to your employer contact:

Nobody has ever lost an internship for asking that. What students do lose, quietly and permanently, is ownership of the work that got them hired in the first place.

One honest caveat: this is general information, not legal advice, and these agreements are fact specific. If you have real prior IP, a startup, or a patent application, get a lawyer's eyes on it. Many schools offer free legal consultations to students through student affairs. Use yours.