Adobe Scholarships

Top of the Line Company Looks for Select Recruits

Adobe’s scholarship and internship opportunities help the company develop both a new generation of Adobe users and a pool of qualified new employees. Adobe was founded in 1982 by two engineers from the famous Palo Alto Research Center owned by Xerox. They intended to design PostScript, which was a way to describe the appearance of a printed page for use in printer-computer communication.

Other Adobe products from that decade are Illustrator and Photoshop, which is still the consumer standard for editing graphics. Acrobat and the PDF (portable document file) format, also still standard, were introduced in 1993, and Adobe moved into web software with its 2005 acquisition of Macromedia. Adobe retained enough strength throughout the recession to continue acquiring other companies, most recently Efficient Frontier in 2011.

While the subject of this page is Adobe corporate scholarships, as of December 2012, there are none. A new set (the Adobe Foundation Creativity Scholarships) is slated to become available in 2013, but as of this writing, the available information is still quite vague, existing primarily in press releases. You are encouraged to visit the Adobe site to get the most up-to-date information on their current offers.

Scholarships From Adobe

At one point, Adobe focused its financial aid on needy students seeking degrees in fields like engineering and education. Today, Adobe has redirected its funding to students interested in creative pursuits. Adobe now uses scholarships as an extension of a philanthropic program called Adobe Youth Voices.

Adobe Youth Voices offers free educational curricula to teachers who want to disseminate knowledge of how to use digital media to their students. While it’s true the program is partly intended to produce more young users who know and love Adobe software, the benefit to the students of this type of training is undeniable. Students will learn how to produce original creative work in the following six categories: video, graphic and web design, animation, photography, audio, and print.

Since Adobe has always been known for multimedia software like Photoshop and Acrobat, and more recently for web applications like Dreamweaver and Flash, this new network of students and teachers is a natural fit for the company. The training is currently offered at over 800 locations in 52 different countries, and its success inspired Adobe to open a new set of scholarships in 2012.

Adobe Foundation Creativity Scholarships

The Adobe Foundation Creativity Scholarships are distributed with a view to encouraging students to pursue creative careers and to use their creative skills to benefit their communities. They are given to participants in the Adobe Youth Voices effort who are seeking higher education in an academic program in some creative field, and students can choose to attend any accredited university, college, or institution that grants certification.

The first application cycle for these scholarships begins in 2013, and Adobe expects to dedicate a million dollars to 2013 scholarship recipients. Applicants will be competing globally, so take pains to make a good impression when you apply.

Internships From Adobe

Adobe offers a variety of student internships as part of its employee recruitment drive. Here are some of the current openings: software engineer to work on games (San Francisco), partner integration manager to make sure that rollouts of the Adobe Marketing Cloud succeed in customers’ environments (Lehi, Utah), account manager (Paris), and compliance officer (Singapore). As you see, there’s a wide variety of possibilities to choose from.

There are three categories in which Adobe is currently seeking interns:

• Technical fields like computer science, statistics, and computer engineering. Adobe always needs programmers, IT specialists, designers for user interfaces, and hardware engineers.
• MBA students, especially those who already have experience working in consulting, marketing, or software. There is constant demand for product and product marketing managers and for business, financial, and human resources analysts.
• General business employment, described as suitable for students in fields like mathematics, finance, law, customer and employee relations, or marketing.

Adobe lists the benefits of its student internships as follows: competitive salary, paid holidays, social and community service events, networking opportunities, and employee discounts on software made by the company.

Eligibility criteria are very simple: you must have legal permission to work and be enrolled in a degree or certificate program at an accredited institution. Adobe does check your Social Security number through E-Verify, to make sure you are legally entitled to employment in this country.

In order to apply, you will need to create an online Adobe Career Opportunities account and use it to create a student profile and resume. The company’s recruiters search the Career Opportunities database when they need someone with a certain set of skills, and you can choose to receive automatic notification of internship openings that match your qualifications.