“So, do you know what you’re doing this summer?”
The first time I heard this question my first year of college, it was December. I had barely figured out my schedule for the next semester, wasn’t even done with finals for my first semester of college and still wasn’t entirely sure where all the buildings on campus were. As the first Vermont cold snap hit me, summer seemed too far away to think about.
Over the next few months I saw how that one question caused most of the stress in my friend group. I was fortunate enough to find an amazing internship early in the process, but most of my friends were not that lucky. As I watched them stress out about finding an internship that was meaningful and would not drive their parents further into debt, I realized that the pressure put on college students (and high school students) to do something ‘useful’ with their summers was excessive and classist.
The pressure to do something useful with your summer begins in high school. My parents didn’t go to school in America and I never really spoke to my friends about summer internships, so the first time I was asked about my summer plans was during a college planning meeting with my guidance counselor, I said I was going to visit my grandmother. From her expression, I could tell that wasn’t the right answer.
Even after leaving that meeting staggering with the weight of summer internship brochures, I decided to spend most of my summer with my family anyway and I have no regrets. Even though my CV was not quite as impressive as some of my friends’, I got to spend time with family that I do not get to see during the year because they live on a different continent. The experience I built straddling cultures and oceans while strengthening connections with my relatives is more valuable to me than any summer internship or SAT prep class.
While I would not trade my experience this summer for anything, I cried for a week before I left because I could not bear the idea of more work after I had barely finished my finals. College is an incredibly high-stress environment and students need at least a little bit of time during the summer to let their brains recover. Putting pressure on them to start working right away in internships that are often incredibly stressful will not allow them time to prepare mentally and emotionally for the next school year. The choice to dedicate at least part of one’s summer to leisure should not be treated as lazy, but as a wise investment into one’s future and current mental health.
Finally, the current definition of a “meaningful summer” is inherently classist. Most interns are either unpaid or underpaid, and funding from schools can be hard to come by. Funding from work-study jobs during the school year can barely be enough to sustain a student during the school year, let alone allow them to save up enough for the summer. For lower income students, there is often no choice but to work a minimum-wage job (or multiple) during the summer, even if they are not getting experience in the field that they want to go into after graduation. Judging those students for “wasting their summer” is privileged and classist.
It is possible to have a life-changing summer internship, but the reality is that most college students will spend their summer being underpaid while doing menial labor in the name of resume-building. The only way to completely break apart this system is to make it easier to find a job for young people with less experience, but until then it is the job of colleges and relatives of college students to stop putting so much pressure on students to do something important each summer.
