What Shall I Do This Summer? -- Two Different Approaches
Intern by Design: Creating Your Own Internship
How to Describe Your Summer Experience on Your College Application
Ideas for Summer Programs

What Shall I Do This Summer?

At the end of your junior year, the idea of lying in a hammock for three months sounds pretty enticing. After all, summer should most of all be a time of rejuvenation, a time to get refreshed after nine months of classes and homework and testing. But no self-respecting teenager wants to just sit around all summer. So the question for some is what to do?

From a college admissions standpoint, there is no right or wrong way to spend your summer as long as you make a commitment to something, whether it's a school program, a volunteer opportunity, a summer camp, skill development, travel, or a job. You can either build on interests and skills you already have, or try something completely new.

Follow Your Passions

In the first category, you take an existing passion or skill and push it further by immersing yourself in it completely. You may have lots of existing passions, or you may have only one or two. If you can't think of any, that doesn't mean that they're not there.

Think about your hobbies and the kind of elective classes that you've enjoyed at school. If you were designing your own school, what would every student be allowed to do or be required to do? What are some non-academic activities that you enjoy that are based upon a particular talent or body of knowledge? Start paying attention to the things that make you happy, the accomplishments of which you are most proud, and the activities you'd rather be doing when you're doing the ones you don't like. When it comes time to design a summer plan, this is a good place to start.

You can dedicate your summers to things that you love. The key is to make sure that you are actively involved. Use the summer as an opportunity to take your skill or passion further than you could during the school year or further than you ever believed that you could at any time of the year. Total concentration or a complete focus brings its own unique intellectual rewards.

New Territory

The second route is to try something new and different. You are challenging yourself by engaging in an activity that you've never done before. You are test-driving hobbies, potential careers, or just things that you've always thought looked fun. This approach is so wide open that it helps to ask yourself a few questions:

Physical: What is my physical comfort level? Do I want to live in a tent, in a dorm, in a house? Do I want to eat foods I've never heard of, or do I want three square meals from a cafeteria? Is part of the adventure to test myself physically?

Cultural: What makes it an adventure? Are the exchange students at school fascinating, or just plain weird? Do you secretly like to observe different groups of students at school, like a cultural anthropologist, fascinated by what makes them them? Are you comfortable with a wide range of people in a diverse set of situations?

Intellectual: You could spend your summer playing chamber music, designing clothes, learning to draw nature, counting seaweed species in tidal areas, or cataloging pottery in a museum. Is it an intellectual adventure that you're after? Will your summer be made special by delving deeply into a subject or an indoor skill, rather than an exotic locale or activity?

Just Engage

This is really the number-one golden rule. Do something. Do it with an open mind and a free spirit. Don't hold back or play it safe. Give yourself to the experience. Volunteer, ask questions, forge relationships. This is how we learn and what makes the difference between an interesting summer activity and an experience that changes your life.

Intern by Design: Creating Your Own Internship

Good internships are like good haircuts: easy to see, but not so easy to come by. As internships are growing increasingly popular among college and grad students, the competition for intern positions at big-name organizations is becoming fierce. From the FBI to Hallmark Cards, top internship programs are now forced to choose from an ever-expanding pool of applicants.

For those dissatisfied with the internship chase, there remains a long neglected but potentially winning route to a dream internship: make your own. Rather than apply only to preestablished programs, internship seekers should consider persuading an organization or an accomplished person who does not normally hire interns to offer an "ad hoc internship."

Here's how: Think of six or so accomplished people whose shoes you would love to fill. It could be a bigwig advertising executive, a documentary filmmaker, a renowned park ranger, a compelling author—the sky's the limit. Just make sure it's not someone so famous that a letter from you would hit the trash before it ever reached your quarry's desk. Supercelebs like Oprah Winfrey, Bruce Springsteen, and H. Ross Perot fall into this class of virtual "unreachables."

After deciding upon a handful of people worth writing, it is time to research them thoroughly. Go to the local library and look up what that journalist (or cardiologist or ski racer or pilot) was doing last week, last month, and last year. Use biographies, databases, magazine indexes, annual reports, the Internet, or anything else that will tell you exactly what your potential mentor is all about.

Then, write each figure an earnest letter that not only introduces you, but convinces him or her that hiring you as an ad hoc intern would be mutally beneficial. Play up your best qualities—abilities either directly related to your potential mentor's work (e.g., your fluency in French if you are writing to the French ambassador) or traits suggesting that you would be a valuable assistant (emphasize your enthusiasm, discreetness, diligence, etc.) Be sure to customize each letter, showing each person that you have done your homework by incorporating into the letter choice bits of information unearthed during your resarch. Convey why his work is exactly the kind with which you want to be involved or why her organization is singularly important to your career aspirations.

Chances are that your six letters, voraciously researched and carefully written, will yield at least one internship opportunity. If you think about it, this ad hoc internship may be more rewarding than a preestablished internship. There will be no preexisting limits to the internship, no areas where you are told "interns have never been allowed to do that." There probably will be no other interns, giving you the pick of possible projects and undivided accessibility to your mentor. It is not hard to see how the ad hoc internship will allow you to work closely with your mentor, forging a professional connection that may last a lifetime.

Some students have already discovered the rewards of the ad hoc internship. A few years ago, a sophomore at a university in California was paging through an issue of Life magazine that profiled the now late Albert P. Blaustein, a constitutional law professor at Rutgers University who had helped more than 40 countries draft their constitutions. His interest piqued, the student dashed off to the campus library and researched Blaustein's recent work. He then wrote this "modern-day James Madison" a detailed letter, introducing himself and offering his services as a summer research assistant. Within two weeks, Blaustein wrote back, informing the student that although no undergraduate had ever asked to be his assistant before, he would take a chance and hire the student for the summer.

When summer came, the student ended up researching constitutional histories for the professor's encyclopedic set of the world's constitutions. Importantly, the professor and his student assistant got along so well that at the end of the summer, when the government of Romania asked Blaustein to help it draft its new constitution, he invited the student to accompany him on a one-week trip to Bucharest. The following autumn found the two journeying to post-revolution Romania, where they met with the country's foreign minister, members of Parliament, and various other officials. Watching the professor advise government officials and academics, the student received a hands-on introduction to constitution-making that he will never forget.

When all was done, the student had created an ad hoc internship that rivalled anything he could have experienced at the best preestablished internships. It goes to show that it sometimes pays to look beyond the internship chase and create an opportunity where none presently exists.

How to Describe Your Summer Experience on Your College Application

If the greatest summer in the world falls in a forest and there is no one around to hear it, it won't help you get into college. You have to tell your story. And if your summer experience was so unusual or so central to your application that you need more than a paragraph or two to explain it, then you've got yourself an essay topic.

Here are the three golden rules for putting your experience into context:

Keep it real. What was the first story you told your parents? How about your friends? When you close your eyes and picture your summer, what is the first thing to come to mind? This is where you start. What did it mean to you? What made it special for you? Forget about what you are supposed to have learned. Forget about trying to make it sound more dramatic or more essay-worthy than it actually was. The admissions people reading the essay want to know about you; they're not interested in hearing what you think they want to hear. Talk about the aspects of your summer that you think you will never forget. It could be the best thing about the summer, the worst, or the scariest. Your essay will be unique and believable because it's true and there's no one quite like you.

Do not talk about how privileged you are to have had the opportunity to do whatever it is that you did. Admissions committees don't care. They don't reward privilege. They read twenty essays every day about how lucky we are here in America, and how we don't realize how much we have, and how you have learned to appreciate the SUV in your driveway since seeing how people live elsewhere. They won't buy it. They're not children or the culture police. Talk about you.

Find a way to relate your experiences over the summer to your day-to-day life. History seems a lot more interesting since you worked on some building originally built by the Romans. You now can appreciate how advanced they were. You had to hike over a ridge for fifteen miles with a full pack. You didn't think that you could do it, but you had no choice. Now you'll think twice about complaining when you are faced with a challenge like writing a ten-page paper. Or your favorite word used to be "awesome." But ever since seeing a glacier up close, you now know what it really means (that great outfit in the store doesn't even come close to qualifying as awesome). You get the picture. Talk about you, your daily life, and the impact of your summer experience.

A Note on Explaining Programs

If your summer was significant, whether you write your essay about it or not, admissions folks need to know about it. If it is a large mainstream program, they are probably familiar with it and you don't have to worry. Just say that you completed the program, when and where, and that should be enough. If the program was smaller or more out of the way, however, they may need more information.

But be careful. These folks are very busy and have a lot to read. We're talking hundreds of essays, hundreds of recommendations, and hundreds of applications. The last thing they need is more reading material. If they will accept a brochure, send them that. If not, it is okay to include a brief description of the program, but keep it to one or two paragraphs, nothing more.

With thanks to the Princeton Review!

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