The Adobe WIT Scholarship is an opportunity presented to undergraduate girls currently pursuing their third year in a Computer Science or related stream. The aim of the scholarship is to encourage more girls and women to explore the field of technology and reduce the existing gender gap in the tech industry.

The scholarship offers several benefits including mentoring by a senior technology leader at Adobe, an opportunity to be considered for an internship at Adobe, a conference ticket to GHCI and funding for the candidate’s remaining tuition fees.

You can read more about the eligibility criteria and benefits of the Adobe WIT Scholarship here.

Scholarship Details

Scholarship will cover:

  1. Fund toward tuition fees for the remainder of the award recipient’s university education ending in academic year 2022.
  2. Opportunity for Summer Internship at Adobe India in 2021.
  3. Mentoring by a senior technology leader from Adobe.
  4. Travel to Grace Hopper Conference India, including participation fees.

A committee of Adobe researchers will be reviewing all applicants and will choose the recipients at their discretion. Recipients are selected based on their research (creative, impactful, important, and realistic in scope), how their work would contribute to Adobe, their technical skills (ability to build complex computer programs), and their personal skills (problem-solving ability, communication, leadership, organizational skills, ability to work in teams).

Students may be invited for phone interviews for internship opportunities prior to Fellowship winner selection.

Application process

The initial application consists of submitting a resume, answering 5-6 essay type questions (the word limit ranges from 200-250 words) and a letter of recommendation from your college professor.

Talking about the application process, there are 5 parts to the application.

1. Basic Information

This part includes filling up basic details about your course, university, CGPA, contact information and research areas of interest. (I would recommend reading up about the advancements in the research areas you’ve mentioned and have thorough knowledge of the subject.) The research areas I had mentioned were Machine Learning, BCI, and Robotics.

2. Essays

There were 5 essay-based questions, all of which you were expected to write in under 200 words. These essays intend to understand your personality, why you’re interested in the field of technology, your goals, the difficulties you’ve faced as a woman in technology, your role model and of course why you think you deserve this scholarship.

While writing these answers, don’t hesitate to mention your achievements or failures, but make sure, to be honest. Craft a story that can describe who you are, your interests and passion, and do not try to answer it superficially.

Your answers should speak more about what you are now rather that what you want to become or achieve in future.

3. Resume

My resume had a combination of my important academic grades, work experience (internships), projects, achievements, positions of responsibility & certifications. Here is a tip - Try to keep your resume short and limit it to a single page. Choose the projects carefully because this is where most of your discussions shall be focused on. Also, make sure that you mention those projects that have a significant impact and deal with real-life scenarios.

Again, make sure to be honest, in your resume about your achievements & projects, because both my interviews were based on the things I had listed in my resume.

4. Academic Transcripts

I had included my semester marksheets (the first three semesters whose results were published) & my 12th and 10th certificates.

5. Letter of Recommendation

Approach a professor from college who knows you personally(and can write a good LOR - Yes it does help in strengthening your application) and request for a letter of recommendation. Try and request in advance, because chances are, your professor could be giving recommendations for a lot of people from your institution as well. So, ensure that, you give the professor sufficient buffer time to submit the letter by the deadline.

6. Multimedia

There’s also an additional multimedia (video) submission link. But it’s completely up to you to decide whether to submit one or not. I decided to submit one.  

 

 

 

The Dream E-Mail

To be honest, I literally applied to for the scholarship with I am not going to make it but there is no harm in trying kind of attitude and on that day when I saw this email, I could not believe my eyes. I was quite excited and nervous about the interview.

The first thing I did was I woke my mom and told her about the email. She was so happy that she hugged me! :-)

Next thing that I did was to reply to the e-mail to schedule the interview. Since I got a lot of days to choose from, I chose 23 November for my interview. Next I began preparing for the interview. I saw a lot of videos of previous scholars and started reiterating on my essays and projects.

 

 

 

Interview Day

It was 23 November 2020, my interview was scheduled in the afternoon between 1:00 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. The platform was bluejeans(almost all the interviews of adobe take place on this platform).

Questions -

  1. Please introduce yourself.
  2. Tell me something about your background and what are the projects you have worked on in college?
  3. Why do you enjoy working on that technology? What about it excites you?
  4. Which of the projects you’ve mentioned are you most proud of and why? (Most important)

We started with discussing the hardware projects. I ws asked about the ICs(since I mentioned about an IR sensing bot). Then I was asked to tell me about the roadblocks for the project.(This discussion lasted around 5 minutes and the interviewer was quite happy with my response).

  1. Can you explain some of the projects that you mentioned ?
  2. Please explain the workflow of the project. (I choose encephalophone - one of my ongoing research project)

I began discussing the details of the project.The interviewer became quite interested in the project and we had a very detailed discussion on the different aspects of the project. (This discussion lasted around 25 minutes).

  1. Mention some instances when you’ve had to lead a team to solve a particular technological problem.
  2. Which of the following projects were done as a team? How was the experience?

Answers the above two questions :

Since my team had won a hackathon at my college, I began discussing the my hackathon project and then I showed the live demonstration of the project. Then I was asked a few questions and I answered them all nicely.

  1. Why do you want this scholarship?
  2. Any questions?

I asked the interviewer about his idea of an ideal candidate. Also,I knew it was a great opportunity to know about the workculture of Adobe so I asked the same question as a followup to the previous one.

This 30 minutes(to be) interview lasted for around 47-50 minutes.

I really enjoyed interacting with the interviewer. This was a very fruitful experience for me.

I was quite happy with my interview. At that point of time I would have never thought that I would clear this interview and qualify for the next interview but I did.

I will be sharing my 2nd interview experience in my next blog. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask them in comment section. I’ll try my level best to help you out.

Till then… Stay tuned and be safe ;-)