Working as a camp counselor is a unique experience. No other summer job requires the level of commitment. Your first summer at camp will feel like both the longest and shortest summer of your life. You'll probably be convinced that there's no way you're going to survive the summer before the kids even arrive, but you'll make some of the best memories of your life.

1. You will never sleep.

You’ll have to be up at the crack of dawn every morning to get 24 kids out of bed and ready for the day -- sun-screened, bug-sprayed and with full water bottles -- and to the dining hall in time for the morning flag ceremony before breakfast. Technically, bedtime is 10, but you don’t get to go to sleep until close to midnight because the kids won’t go to bed and then you have to shower. Someone (meaning probably you) has to wake up twice every night for bed-checks -- to make sure no one has wandered off in their sleep or snuck off to have some midnight fun. Then you start it all over in the morning at the crack of the next dawn.

2. You will always smell like a campfire, and by the end of the summer you will never want to see another s'more again.

You will build so many fires. You’ll be an expert by the end of your first week. You’ll never get the smell of fire out of all the clothes you bring to camp -- six months after summer is over you’ll pick up a T-shirt and it’ll smell like a stale campfire. You will eat more s’mores than you ever thought possible, and you’ll be completely sick of them by the end of the summer. “I never want to see another marshmallow in my entire life,” you’ll say, but by the time next summer rolls around you’ll actually find yourself craving (s’)more.

3. You will feel like a mother of 24.

Those 24 kids are your entire world for a week, and though you share responsibility for them with two or three other counselors, you won’t feel like it. These kids will look up to you, they will make you things, they will ask your permission to go places and do things. They will also look to you to settle their arguments for them, and by the end of the summer you will be an expert at compromising.

4. You will be the master of all things crafty.

You’ll spend eight weeks teaching kids and even other counselors the best tie-dye techniques, how to make lanyards and friendship bracelets and perfecting your duct tape craftsmanship. You’ll also spend as much time teaching crafts as you do learning from kids who seem to know everything there is to know about arts and crafts -- even things you’ve never heard of (and you’re definitely going to steal that idea and teach it to next week’s campers).

5. Some kids will hate you, but most will love you.

There’s always going to be a problem child who refuses to listen to you, but the rest of them will be manageable. This is a learned skill that gets easier as the summer goes on. Months later you’ll hear your camp name screamed at you, and it’ll give you about six seconds’ warning before there’s a small child barreling into you and giving you the biggest bear hug a 12-year-old can give.

6. You'll make the best of friends in those endless weeks of summer you live at camp. They could be 10 or 20 years old.

When you spend a week -- or eight -- with someone, you grow close. There will be that counselor that you always seem to end up in the same cabin with, and those kids who seem to be there all summer. You’d never think you could be such close friends with someone you only see during two months out of the year, but they’re the ones you hope come back each time.

7. If you go back to the same camp every summer, you'll get to watch some of these kids grow up -- and eventually work alongside at least one or two of them.

You might work at the camp you attended as a camper. If so, your counselors have watched you go from camper to counselor-in-training (CIT) to coworker, and now you are on your counselors’ end of the process. When a kid turns up one summer with a name-tag and a paycheck, you know what a proud parent feels like.

8. When you tell other people what you spent your summer doing, they'll look at you like you're crazy.

They just don’t understand. Sometimes you yourself wonder why you pour your whole life into camp for the summer, but then a camper brings you a gift -- something they made for you, a letter they wrote to you or just a really cool rock they found -- and you are reminded of exactly why.

9. You put yourself through camp because it’s simultaneously the most difficult and most rewarding thing you’ll ever experience.

Living with total strangers for two months is not something many people survive. As a counselor, you have to, and honestly you’ll be better off later in life for it. There will be arguments and misunderstandings between you and other counselors and the kids, but they resolve quickly. That feeling at the end of the week, at the awards ceremony, is a feeling you will never forget.

10. You learn to be weird.

When you work with kids for long enough, eventually you learn the key to success -- be weird. The kids love it and, weirdly enough, respect you more if you can let loose and be a little eccentric. Once you leave camp, you’ll have to remind yourself how to be a normal human being.

11. Post-camp identity crisis.

This happens once camp is over and you have to figure out how to adapt back into the real world, where people wear pants and there aren’t hordes of children following you around all the time. It’s even worse if you use a name at camp that people don’t use in the real world -- you’ll have to retrain yourself how to respond to your actual name.

12. You will break down and cry, but it will be the best summer of your life.

This job is the most stressful thing you will ever endure, and you hardly stop for eight weeks. Kids and responsibilities will overwhelm you, and chances are you will walk into the counselor room after dealing with a situation and burst into tears -- more than once. But you’ll wipe your face and put that smile back on and face the world again. At the end of the summer you will look back and realize that the stress and the crying was all part of the best time of your life. Being a camp counselor, even if just for one summer, is something you will remember for the rest of your days.