# What Does an Intern at Min Guhong Manufacturing Do?

https://minguhongmfg.com/en/products/what-does-an-intern-at-min-guhong-manufacturing-do

Date: 2021-07-03

As stated some time ago in Frequently Asked Questions, Min Guhong Manufacturing does not run an internship program. Officially, at least. Even if the Rapture were to happen tomorrow, this would not change. There is, after all, no need for an intern. Many companies assign interns simple, repetitive tasks of little importance in the name of education and practice, while the interns fall under the illusion that they are doing important work as members of the company. This is the usual system by which the relationship between a company and its interns operates. Within it, the relationship only repeats; it does not advance. Danger inevitably lurks in a relationship in which one side must bear the yoke.

Already living off a host for lack of capital and courage, Min Guhong Manufacturing conducts almost all its work within a system designed to let its operator carry it out comfortably on his own. (Tasks beyond his capacity are sometimes entrusted to associates with whom the company has signed MOUs \[Memorandums of Understanding\], including its immediate host, Workroom.) Ideally, simple, repetitive tasks of little importance should not be done at all. When unavoidable, they tend to be handled by software developed for the task, following the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle. Suppose it takes four hours to organize 100,000 spreadsheets of more than 100,000 rows each, or to clean up the outlines of 100,000 images measuring 100,000 pixels on each side. The craftsmanship required is better spent devoting two hours to developing software that can do the work in one hour, and another hour to choosing a splendid title for it. Unexpected bugs may make things a little bumpy, of course, but while the software works for an hour, the operator can leisurely drink tea or take a walk. There is also the advantage of reusing the software for similar work in the future, though its title may change.

What, then, does an intern at Min Guhong Manufacturing do? The question is not unlike Lev Tolstoy’s “What do people live by?” and is rather like “What should we have for lunch today?” Interns assign themselves their work and determine how to proceed and when to finish. Min Guhong Manufacturing merely decides whether the work is suitable for the company and checks in occasionally to see whether it is progressing smoothly. Once it is complete, the intern leaves. Even if it remains unfinished, the company does not particularly mind, provided no enormous financial loss has been inflicted. The consequences of failure belong entirely to the intern. Did not Thomas Edison, who failed countless times as a businessman, say, “Failure is the mother of success”? Success is not necessary in everything, and there is much to learn from failure. If interns cannot assign themselves work—if they cannot exercise their own agency—there is not much Min Guhong Manufacturing can assign them. Perhaps having lunch and tea with the operator, visiting The Book Society to look at new releases, walking around the office neighborhood, and occasionally reading a piece like this in advance to judge whether the sentences could become more concise or more complex. But that is closer to a date between lovers than to education or practical training.

What else Min Guhong Manufacturing can offer an intern is meager indeed. The only tokens of belonging are a plastic intern ID to hang around the neck and a temporary email address at minguhongmfg.com. There is no dedicated desk, either, so interns must share part of the operator’s not particularly spacious desk. And they must perch on a somewhat tall stool, rather than a chair carefully designed for work.

Few would enjoy these conditions. At the end of the internship, all they would gain are memories of Min Guhong Manufacturing and a single line on their résumé. Those with grand ambitions are more likely to waste precious time. That is why Min Guhong Manufacturing does not officially run an internship program.

Nevertheless, the company receives inquiries from schools and students at [support@minguhongmfg.com](mailto:support@minguhongmfg.com), especially around the start of school holidays. Most begin with simple curiosity and end once that curiosity is satisfied, but what matters is their willingness to take on something apparently useless. It is another way of forming a relationship. Park Inwook, the director of thisisneverthat, who spent 2020 working with Min Guhong Manufacturing, once said, “\[…\] The more useless something seems, the more beautiful I find it.” Three interns have passed through the company in this way so far.

The first left one day after joining. He was a graphic design student in Seoul. Before graduating and becoming independent, he assigned himself the task of finding out what attitude he should maintain as a maker. Through his chosen method—a conversation with the operator—he completed the task. In return, Min Guhong Manufacturing could introduce itself as a company solid enough to have an intern.

The second was studying graphic design in Arnhem, the Netherlands. His school allowed students to replace their final semester with an internship, and he wanted to spend that time at Min Guhong Manufacturing. His self-assigned tasks were to keep a Min Guhong Manufacturing Internship Diary and propose a logo for the company, which still lacked one. The work was inherently an extension of a graphic design class. After even an unexpected video conference with the school, the operator defined the assignment as follows:

> Based on research into Min Guhong Manufacturing through the internet, academic papers, newspapers, books, periodicals, rumors, and other sources, define what kind of company it is and propose a suitable logo. The logo is not restricted to flat graphics. Depending on the definition, it may be a less-flat graphic, a poem, a novel, a comic, music, a video, or something else. It must, however, remain true to a logo’s basic purpose of symbolizing or metaphorically representing something. Faithful to the designer’s role and at the same time somewhat performative, this work continues until Min Guhong Manufacturing—the most demanding client, at least outside the Netherlands—is convinced by the proposal. Publish a record of the process in print, as a website, or in another form. Along with keeping the Min Guhong Manufacturing Internship Diary, this is the core of the work to be done as an intern.

![](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/what-does-an-intern-at-min-guhong-manufacturing-do/c8460d92e9-1791638648/internship-diary-600x600-q100.png)

The diary was kept in Google Sheets. Rows containing the date, Wi-Fi name, distance from Min Guhong Manufacturing, and work completed formed its main entries; these were converted to JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and connected to a website. Day by day, the diary filled and logo proposals accumulated. Although he sometimes wondered whether he was truly happy, everything was going smoothly. After a business trip to Jeju Island to clear his head, the intern suddenly vanished. None of his proposed logos was used. He did not finish his self-assigned work, but surely he found happiness.

The third was a film theory student and a member of a radical underground anarchist group whose name cannot be disclosed. He had just quit a part-time job at an independent bookshop. His self-assigned task was to render Gmail useless by legal means. The method was simple. Each day, he said, he would sign up for as many Gmail accounts as he could, claiming the remaining email addresses. If no one else could sign up, would Gmail not be nullified? That was his claim and his logic. As an official “Friend of Google Fonts,” Min Guhong Manufacturing found the task somewhat troubling. Still, as Gmail imposed no limit on the number of email addresses an individual could own, there was no problem.

![](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/what-does-an-intern-at-min-guhong-manufacturing-do/d75d316b1d-1791638649/safari-screenshot-2025-06-03-10.54.54-600x600-q100.png)

Lowercase English letters or numbers, at least six and no more than thirty characters. Having identified Gmail’s username rules, he set straight to work, sitting in front of the monitor and moving between sign-up pages. Once absorbed in the task, he often skipped lunch. Creating a Gmail account took roughly a minute: about sixty addresses an hour, 480 in eight hours, 4,800 in ten days, and 14,400 in a month.

For the intern, Min Guhong Manufacturing made a Random Gmail Username Generator. Following Gmail’s rules, it generates a random username every 0.1 seconds: sixty in one second, 3,600 in one minute, 216,000 in one hour, 1,728,000 in eight hours, and 17,280,000 in ten days. It merely generates usernames, but would be of some help with his work.

Occasionally, the randomly generated usernames formed words, phrases, or sentences with a clear order. Some were flash fiction of up to thirty characters, fully worthy of being called “works”; some were more beautiful than anything written by an author; others contained truths that religious believers spend their lives seeking. Gazing blankly at the generator, the intern said he wanted to become a poet. If not a poet, at least something like one. Without realizing it, he had come to understand the order of language.

- [https://thebooksociety.org/?q=YToxOntzOjEyOiJrZXl3b3JkX3R5cGUiO3M6MzoiYWxsIjt9&bmode=view&idx=7148741&t=board&category=ikwhg83D86](https://thebooksociety.org/?q=YToxOntzOjEyOiJrZXl3b3JkX3R5cGUiO3M6MzoiYWxsIjt9&bmode=view&idx=7148741&t=board&category=ikwhg83D86)
- [intern-id-card.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/what-does-an-intern-at-min-guhong-manufacturing-do/9539b4ff3b-1791638648/intern-id-card.png)
- [internship-diary.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/what-does-an-intern-at-min-guhong-manufacturing-do/c8460d92e9-1791638648/internship-diary.png)
- [safari-screenshot-2025-06-03-10.54.54.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/what-does-an-intern-at-min-guhong-manufacturing-do/d75d316b1d-1791638649/safari-screenshot-2025-06-03-10.54.54.png)
- [what-should-intern-do.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/what-does-an-intern-at-min-guhong-manufacturing-do/4e2189b542-1791638649/what-should-intern-do.png)