Adobe Launches Micro Internship Initiative With HBCU and HSI Athletes

With the intensive demands of college athletics, athletes at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) rarely have time in their packed schedules for valuable professional development opportunities and internships.

Through the new Adobe Student Athlete Micro Internship program (SAMI), Adobe’s Diversity and Talent Acquisition Team is striving to provide a solution. Adobe’s program aims to break down these barriers and help athletes gain real-world experience in areas such as marketing and sales.

“SAMI has been designed with student athletes’ demanding training schedules in mind and will allow them to showcase many of their transferable skills from the sports field in a corporate environment,” Adobe said in a press release.

The SAMI micro internships will have compressed schedules to accommodate athletes’ training regimens, running for five weeks with four-hour workdays. Athletes from Winston Salem State University, Bowie State University and San Jose University will participate in the initiative’s inaugural year.

Adobe previously announced $1 million investments in those three universities, but is taking another step to help bridge the opportunity gap for those schools’ athletes. 

Read more about why brands should embrace micro internships here

“Recent research from the National Association of Colleges and Employers showed that one in five student athletes said that their athletic obligations prevented them from pursuing internship opportunities,” Adobe said. “While we’ve seen some colleges and universities help connect their student athletes with internship opportunities, we recognized that the same type of support simply does not exist for many HBCUs and HSIs.”

In addition to experience in a corporate setting, Adobe also hopes to provide athletes with professional development and networking opportunities and give them a sense of Adobe’s workplace culture. Adobe says that internships have been “a critical funnel for hiring the future talent of Adobe,” and sees the SAMI program as a vital part in the company’s efforts to increase minority representation and erase systematic inequalities.