Scott Green

Summer employment is a great chance for college students to get real world experience in their areas of study. For example, if you’re studying to be a teacher, you can get a job as a camp counselor. And if you’re studying to be a biochemist, you can get a job as a camp counselor.

That’s because companies don’t trust you to do work that, if handled improperly, could cost them hundreds of dollars. It’s much better to just leave you responsible for the lives of a dozen eight-year-olds.

I spent four years as a counselor at a sports-themed day camp in Long Grove, Illinois. Mostly I handled the campers whose parents requested they get extra arts and crafts. Usually they were the kids whose social skills were not fully developed, but there was a special joy in working with them in the art room because–call me a sap if you want–I got to sit down.

My other major responsibility was giving swim lessons to seven-year-olds. The main stroke they had to learn was the front crawl, and I managed to teach a great many children how to do this well enough to pass to the next level, even though I cannot do the front crawl myself. If things had gotten hairy in the pool, the kids would’ve had to drag me to safety.

Anyway, this experience is a real asset to me in my chosen field, law. For example, if there’s a big case and I have to prepare an oral argument, the things I learned as a counselor have prepared me to teach the judge the front crawl.

Another popular summer job is painting houses. Not everyone has heard of this, but I used to see fliers all over the place seeking college laborers to paint and a bunch of my friends actually did it. Possibly in anticipation of the fumes.

This one never appealed to me. Granted, the job teaches many important skills, such as how to get paint out of your hair. But what if you were really good at it? Before you knew it, you’d be a professional house painter, thereby wasting a perfectly good liberal arts education that otherwise would’ve qualified you to work in upper management at the local Chuck E. Cheese’s.

But your best option, provided I wasn’t the person who taught you how to swim, might be lifeguarding. You get to spend the summer at the beach, working on your tan and slathering sunscreen on your gorgeous, promiscuous co-workers. If you’re lucky, you could save the child of the hiring partner for the accounting firm you wanted to work for.

In an ideal world you’d be able to get an internship. The theory is, if you fill enough coffee cups and staple enough memos, you can prove you’re at least trustworthy enough not to steal coffee cups and staples. That’s enough to get a lifetime job in most companies.

But internships tend to go to people with real wiener-looking resumes, full of things like “President of the Junior Snivelers of America” and “Maintained 4.0 GPA Despite Donating Seven Liters Of Blood To Orphans Every Week.” For most of us this is unrealistic. For most of us the best resume line we can come up with is “Knows the Most Comfortable Chair in the Art Room.”