Susie@NAVER

Design League
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

Hi! I’m Susie, a rising junior in the Communication Design program! This summer, I interned at NAVER Corp, an IT company in South Korea. The internship was 10 weeks long and this was their first time recruiting from overseas.

Flying from the U.S. to South Korea!

I’m not entirely sure how much I can share, so I’ll just talk about the general internship, experience, and what the area is like.

Design Internship

All the design interns except one (taking the photo)

Bori (a graduate CMU Design student) and I came a few weeks earlier than the rest of the Korean interns. They were interning to get hired at the end of the internship while we were more of a learning and experience internship.

Bori and I were assigned to one team and one project for the entire 10 weeks while the others intern for 8 weeks with 2 projects. Bori and I were assigned one mentor originally (UX Design), but by the end of week 10, we basically had 6 (4 UX, 2 UI). Everyone involved in the project genuinely wanted to help us out(: It was my first time actually implementing the design thinking that we learn in the classroom and considered UI to that extent.

During the 9th week, the CEO wanted the design interns and the service interns to work on a week long project in groups of 4–5. I do think that this week was one of the more packed, but enjoyable weeks! It was interesting to work with people of a different mindset than designers. The most difficult part for me was probably language. Everything was done in Korean, so a little translating hamster was working nonstop in my brain.

My week long team: Hyeryeong, Gahee, Kyungil, Kyungjin

NAVER

I worked at NAVER’s headquarters: Naver Green Factory. The first two floors are open to public, then the rest of the building is restricted to employees only. Within floors B1, 3–27, there’s 2 cafes, 1 food court, 1 convenience store, 1 work out floor, 1 health center (featuring a room for naps!, massages, a doctor), 1 bank, and more. Honestly, there’s really no need to ever leave the building….. except to see friends and family… I suppose.

The floor I worked on, my desk featuring my purchases with the employee discount, breakfast vending machine, open work space

The office is almost entirely green and there is free breakfast every morning! You can get it from a vending machine conveniently placed on almost every floor! If you’ve ever seen my snap stories from these past 10 weeks… you could see how well designed/ decorated the entire building is.

The work hours are from 10AM to 7PM, but quite flexible both ways.

The food that’s served at the B1 kitchen is honestly better than a lot of food I’ve had outside the company walls. Each meal was ~$2 too! Around 5pm (I think) the kitchen serves snacks.

South Korea

The office is located in Bundang, which is quite close to Seoul. My residence was in Pangyo, a short 20 minutes from Gangnam in Seoul. If I ever made dinner plans, it was almost always at 8pm, Gangnam Station, Exit 11. It was tiring to have post work plans on the weekdays, so every weekend I tried to make the best of my time. I went to Seoul almost every weekend and went to places such as Hongdae, Gangnam, Garusogil, Jamsil, DDP, etc. I even went on a weekend trip to the coast city of Busan with a few friends from school! The city never seems to sleep! Especially in the summertime, there were numerous concerts going on + small vacation opportunities.

Summary

My notebook from this summer

Overall, I thought that interning at NAVER was a really good learning experience. Although I had to adjust and understand a lot of small cultural differences, my experience there was unforgettable thanks to the wonderful mentors and friends that helped guide my way. I learned a lot of classroom to workplace application that would’ve been hard to understand without work experience. I really appreciated how everyone was involved in their work. Even in times of leisure, there would be constant conversation about topics relating to the industry. I truly think that surrounding yourself with enthusiastic people also greatly affects the general atmosphere of any project you delve into. I’m glad I was lucky enough to intern at NAVER this summer and I’ll miss all the friendly faces I’ve met on the way.

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Design League

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