FORESIGHT(2023): Summer Internship at Adobe | Raghav Aggarwal |

1) Brief Introduction.

Hi everyone! My name is Raghav Aggarwal. I am a final year undergrad from Electronics and Electrical Communications at IITKgp.

2) How did you get into Adobe? What was the selection procedure?

I applied to Adobe via the CDC internship program organized by CDC, IITKgp.

The first round was the coding test which contained pretty cliche questions in DSA with some alterations. I wouldn’t say the test was easy but it wasn’t on the too challenging side as well. The coding round was common to both Research and Product Development roles.

The first interview round was a pretty basic DSA round where they asked standard questions and then one hard difficulty question(grading the questions according to leetcode standards) before proceeding to the final interview stage.

The final interview was taken by a senior developer in the firm whose primary source of questions was my CV. He first went through all the projects and experiences and then selected a project to discuss in depth.

3) How to prepare for them?

For the Coding round do interviewbit, leetcode and try timely practicing questions of DSA. One thing students get often confused between is Competitive Programming and DSA. They’re not the same and hence if you’re practicing on just Codeforces or Codechef start doing DSA practice as well. CP is good for timed practice and increasing analytical thinking but most of the companies in SDE are going to ask questions based on fundamental applications of DSA.

For the interview prep I’d suggest making notes of your CV where you have pointers to explain each and every project/experience in both brief and detail. This will help you in a lot of interviews. Most of the interviewers I faced just asked me to skim through my projects and then asked detailed questions from a particular area in some project.

Also do remember to learn basics of computer memory organization (stack memory, etc.). It’s not generally asked by any other firms but Adobe interviewers always ask questions from this area. You do not need to prepare thoroughly, a short 1–2 hour research on YouTube before the interview will suffice.

4) According to you, who should ideally apply for this job?

As for the product development intern role, anyone who’s interested in development and DevOps should definitely apply to this firm. The people around here are experts in their fields with a significant amount of experience. The guidance and learnings you will be provided here are unparalleled. Also the projects are based on Adobe’s flagship products, hence you get to work on pretty fascinating and cutting edge tech. The code you’ll be working on is going to be the production level code of the products and you get to learn a lot from the coding style itself used here.

5) Any specific advice you want to give to the junta sitting for internships this year?

Do talk to a senior in the same company before sitting for the interview. It always helps to know what the company might be expecting in the interview and provides you with an edge.

Do not lie to the interviewer or give “fundaes”. These people are usually experts in their domain and know when someone is trying to fool them.

Do let them know of your thought process while giving an answer in the DSA rounds, they might help you in the direction of the solution or warn you when you wander too far. They are more interested in your thought process than the final answer.

And DON’T GIVE UP! This might be the most important. You might be not shortlisted a lot of times or get rejected from an interview which went perfectly but sometimes things don’t work in the way they should and misfortunes happen. Believe me there are plenty of better companies which come in the later days and it’s going through the process itself which will make you learn a lot.

6) What are some of the major points you think would be valid to mention in your CV while targeting this profile? (any specific suggestions you would like to make?)

The interviewer in my panel got fascinated by a simple C++ project (not DSA) because he had experience with similar kind of technology. One-third of my second interview went in just discussing that project which really made a good impression on my interviewer. Although the majority of us have works in Python, Machine Learning, etc. do remember to have a little diversity in the projects/experience section.