This summer, I participated in many different activities as a way to boost my reputation and resume for colleges to hand pick me as one of the potential future students. One of these was volunteering at a hospital and getting some experience in the field of medicine. However, due to my minor status, we were unable to see many of the important surgeries or events that were occurring in the hospital simply due to my age. However, I did get to meet some great new people and most of them were parents. Going into the last couple weeks, I noticed a trend that they seemed to all be discussing one common topic, how our summers have slipped away from middle school and high school kids.
Summers used to be about enjoying what we missed out on doing during the school year. We used to talk about doing all these interesting actives during the summer like going on trips or going to the amusement park but alas, we have to focus on simply doing what a university deems acceptable of us. It has become that our entire year long life has been more about becoming more well rounded instead of living out our childhood. Don't get me wrong, when we have time, we spend it doing nothing but that is only another fault of the community we are living it. We are so used to having an event to do for school or some extracurricular, we cannot find the simple use in relaxing for a bit. I often read resumes of people who have been accepted into the top universities in our nation and I often feel inadequate due to the simple fact that I cannot produce the high volume of actives that put in year in and year out.
Going back to the hospital, most of the parents were complaining that they are unable to spend quality time with their children on vacation because the kids are simply doing some camp or some volunteering or some miscellaneous resume filler. They said that going out of the country was out of the question because aligning dates for multiple kids was simply impossible and they had to settle for 3 day short vacations in the area instead of going some trip that might last the whole week. While this might not be ideal, at least they were able to carve out some time for the family. Others might not be so lucky. They might have to wait even longer to get that chance.
As idealized from our childhood, summer was filled by going to the pool, going on vacations, or simply just enjoying the company of friends. I have seen my friend a grand total of seven times this summer and some of those times were to work on the summer homework we receive from school. It's just a tragedy of what summer has turned into and what it used to be about. It used to be about enjoying or spending time but now its about school year round.
Sheetal Tadiparty
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