Courtesy of Mike Gecawicz
Mike Gecawicz during a typical workday in Dongguan, China.
- This native Bostonian is a worker on an assembly line in China.
- Mike Gecawicz assembles 3.5 mm headphone cables in Dongguan, a city in Southern China.
- He chose to become a factory worker to gain a better perspective on the products we use everyday.
Mike Gecawicz is a student at the University of Maine, where he studies new media.
He spent his summer break in a headphones factory in Dongguan, China - a city of eight million sometimes called "the factory of the world."
Gecawicz's father works in headphones and headsets, and helped connect him with a factory owner in Dongguan. He spent a previous summer in the same factory as a camp counselor for the workers' kids.
"I'm not entirely sure why they wanted me to come and do this," Gecawicz said in an interview with Business Insider.
"Part of it for me was that most people will go through their entire life and never really know where their product comes from," Gecawicz said. "I wanted to do this as a way to get better exposure to things I don't know so well, and that most people in my position would never get to see."
He's found his summer of dealing with smog, trying solidified blood, and developing headphone models to be "enlightening and rewarding."
"I could recommend it to anybody," said Gecawicz, who is originally from Boston. "It's a great way to get perspective."
Keeping reading for a look into what it was like to work in a Chinese factory.