Nintendo said it will sponsor a five-year professorship program at DigiPen Institute of Technology. The Nintendo Professorship of Video Game Technology is the first professorship of its kind offered by Nintendo in North America. It is said to expand the existing programs at the school - Digipen currently offer programs in Computer Animation, Computer Engineering, and more.
DigiPen Institute of Technology - also nicknamed Donkey Kong U - was founded in 1988 by Claude Comair and was the first school to offer courses that prepared students for jobs in the computer and video game industries. In 1994, DigiPen, with the assistance of Nintendo of America, officially accepted its first class of video game programming students - via a two-year program.
Only about 200 students are accepted into the school each year, however there are nearly 24,000 requests for applications.
Many of the graduating students have been placed in such companies as Nintendo Software Technology Corp (NSTC), Konami, Electronic Arts, and Microsoft. In fact, Nintendo's NSTC is composed mainly of graduates from DigiPen. Nintendo likes to draw upon the graduates because they're specifically trained for the video game industry. Nearly all eight programmers and half of the 14 artists who worked on Wave Race: Blue Storm for GameCube graduated from DigiPen.