Breakthrough Interactions and Graphics Lab Intern Review

I was given a project which I worked on mostly on my own. This internship was remote and I had a short meeting with my mentor everyday. I worked on developing a webapp that helps people understand creative processes better and brainstorming solutions to the open ended problem and then implementing them myself. During the start of the internship, I spent a lot of time teaching myself new programming languages I have not used before. The rest of the internship was spent on developing the tool. Note: This is a research internship role, not a software dev one.

Yes, I picked up new programming languages and learned them during the course of my internship. This included: React, NodeJS, JavaScript, Objective-C. They were not too difficult to learn. My knowledge was mostly Python so there were things that were quite different but I was able to pick it up during my internship. I developed my soft skills too - I was encouraged to network as much as I could and needed to practise and prepare for my intern presentation.

I was responsible for my own project and needed to be able to independently set my own milestones in order to achieve the bigger goal. I was told the most important thing was progress on the project. I was expected to actively reach out and find opportunities where I could during my internship. I was not really told what to do most of the time, just given a rough guide and direction.

The daily meetings with my mentor were very helpful - we were able to work through problems together at times when I was stuck and I could always reach out to other employees for support whenever I needed it. There was also a good balance between independent learning and guidance. I enjoyed the challenge of figuring out problems independently but when I felt like I needed some more help, it was very easy just to reach out to someone because everyone else seemed more than happy to help.

Everybody here is so friendly! There are occasional fun intern events and we are always encouraged to connect and network with other colleagues and find out about their work and vice versa. Meetings with my mentor would usually start off with a short catch up about our daily lives before diving into work related talk. This would be an aspect I miss about non-remote internships - being able to chat briefly in passing with someone not necessarily about work. There were also monthly 'Women in research' meetings where we would talk about anything.

I really enjoyed it! I was a shame it was remote, but the project that I was given was really fun and I rarely found working here boring at all. In contrast, in my previous internship, I know I had not really enjoyed the work as much and was given repetitive mundane work. There was not as much creativity I could just implement into my work and not as much opportunity for coding.

Yes

You need to be passionate and self-driven - at Adobe research people don't really tell you what to do. They are looking for people who are able to pick up and learn new skills quickly and have a research/engineering mindset - always asking questions that lead to a possible solution, simplifying solutions and being able to find a way to try them out. Try and have a project that you can share at your interview that showcases these skills.