Adobe India Women-in-Technology Scholars: Solving Technical Challenges

September 8, 2020

(left) Tripti Shukla; (middle) Ishika Singh; (right) Shubhika Garg

Adobe Research launched the Adobe India Women-in-Technology Scholarship program in 2016 to encourage more young women to pursue a career in technology. Since then, the scholarship has been awarded annually to talented winners from colleges across India.

After a thorough selection process, each scholarship winner is offered a financial award and, potentially, an opportunity to interview for an Adobe internship with a senior-level technical mentorship. Scholarship applications for this program for 2021 are now open here.

In 2020, five scholarship winners were recognized by Adobe Research India. Of those, three students were later selected as Adobe Research India interns for 2020 summer, and one interned with an Adobe product team.

The 12-week Adobe Research India internship is both intense and rewarding. Following the switch to virtual work, these interns brought their passion and fresh perspectives to the research teams to help solve new technical challenges.

Structured yet flexible

Ishika Singh, one of the 2020 Adobe India Women in Technology Scholarship winners who was chosen as an intern, worked on a research project related to claim verification, a novel research topic in machine learning. “This internship is not like any other internship undergraduates are usually offered,” Singh says.

“Being structured yet flexible, this internship imparted a sense of ownership of the project by allowing freedom starting right from the choice of the problem statement, to implementing my very own solution ideas. This ownership can extend beyond just the feeling, in the form of patents and papers in your name,” she adds.

Despite the demands of the internship, Singh found it “very fast-paced, creativity-intensive” that “gave me a sense of satisfaction at the end of each day.”

Even prior to her internship, the scholarship award itself gave Singh a vote of confidence: “The scholarship also encouraged me a lot to keep up with my efforts and do what I find most interesting.”

New learning, and new experiences

Scholarship winner and intern Shubhika Garg described her 2020 internship experience as “a steep learning curve” where she quickly learned a lot of new things. Before joining Adobe for the summer, Garg had focused on computer vision, and didn’t have a lot of experience in projects related to natural language processing. However, with the support of her mentors, she was able to get up to speed on this field during her internship project, where she explored new ways of easing the process of visualizing, understanding, and editing documents for users.

“The motivation for pursuing this project was the impact such a feature could have on our lives. Reading, understanding, and editing documents are integral parts of everyone’s day-to-day lives, and it would be really helpful to the community if we could develop something to help,” Garg says.

She gives this advice to future interns at Adobe: “Don’t be intimidated by new experiences. Instead, welcome them with open arms and give your 100 percent,” she advises.

Mentors’ guidance

Senior-level technical mentors also played an important role in helping students grow in their careers. Scholarship winner and 2020 intern Tripti Shukla worked on a new research idea on document beautification that combined layout, font, color, and text recommendations. She said she benefited from both her research mentors’ guidance, and her own sense of drive. The internship allowed her to balance the two.

Says Shukla, “the best part about interning at Adobe Research is the unique structure of the internship. We always have a mentor to guide whenever we are stuck. But what we innovate and achieve out of the internship totally depends on our own willingness to take initiative and create something out of the box.”

Apply for a scholarship

The 2021 Adobe India Women-in-Technology Scholarship program is now open for applications. We encourage women college students in India who are interested in pursuing a career in technology to apply here for the scholarship by September 20, 2020. Scholarship winners may be considered separately for a potential internship opportunity.

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