<p>The money that crappy, menial jobs pay is just as green as the money that fulfilling and meaningful ones pay. I’m just saying.</p>
<p>What kind of paying job do you have now, and why can’t you keep it through the summer?</p>
<p>If you don’t have a paying job right now, what is your excuse? To paraphrase franglish, green is green.</p>
<p>If your parents cannot or will not pay for summer housing then the decision has been made for you. Come home, get a job and contribute to your education. </p>
<p>I know I have already warned my D that her summers are to be spent working, earning $$ and experience, and contributing to the cause. </p>
<p>I often hire new college grads. Young adults that have worked (for $$) are always more valuable to me than those that haven’t. It is shocking to me the number of students who have barely earned a paycheck interviewing for their first real job. No thanks. I am not interested. </p>
<p>Any job is going to teach you valuable life skills. People skills are the most important thing in any field.</p>
<p>Not absolutely necessary, but boring as heck. What would you do with yourself? And how would you fund anything you did want to do? Go, earn some money. If finances are an issue for you parent, earn enough to contribute something meaningful toward your education. If you don’t pay them already, pick up your own personal expenses, your own books, your own fees.</p>
<p>Our son just returned home after freshman year of college. We gave him a few days to unpack and decompress, but he is at this very moment putting in his fourth day at his full time summer job. He is doing somewhat menial, tedious work - assembly at a local design/manufacturing company. This is his first real job, and I think his eyes have been widely opened. He is learning some valuable lessons. We have stressed to him that because he ultimately aspires to be on the other end of the supply chain (engineering and design), walking in the shoes of persons in production and assembly will make him a more well-rounded engineer with a better understanding of areas beyond engineering. Is he loving it? No, but we are encouraging him to learn all that he can about the business process and to do his very best every day, no matter the task. </p>
<p>This job has also been an encouragement to stay in school and get that degree! He can see now that he would not be happy doing this type of job day after day, year after year. That being said, we are thankful that he has secured full-time work for the summer, especially in these economic conditions and the unemployment rate for teenagers. Having him lounging around the house for 3 or 4 months would have been torture - for all of us! After putting in 9 hours of work, he comes home and really appreciates the non-working hours he does have. Welcome to the real world, son! :)</p>
<p>What makes you think you are going to get an internship without any job experience or big holes in your resume? My son (rising junior) got his first real job this summer. He had to justify just how he’d spent the time he wasn’t working or studying. Last summer he spent the first half of the summer studying Arabic in Jordan, and there were no summer jobs when he got back. He worked on earrings which I sell in a local gallery part time. I think he had plenty of lying around doing not much time.</p>
<p>Mine are just finishing freshman year. D is coming home for 3 weeks of R&R but then going back to summer school at her college for 6 weeks. S is home a whopping 1 day and then leaves to be a camp counselor at the camp he attended for years. Camp counselor isn’t related to anything he wants to do for a living, necessarily, but it was a big part of his life and I think that’s fine to do that kind of thing, too.</p>
<p>PG:</p>
<p>Red Arrow Camp by chance?</p>
<p>No - I’ll PM you.</p>
<p>I would have to disagree with the majority of replies.</p>
<p>First, let me say that I won’t claim to know how much a job freshman summer impacts internships. I couldn’t get a job my freshman summer, and I ended up getting an internship, and I don’t even remember anyone asking me about freshman summer. However, this was about 5 years ago, and I am sure things may have changed.</p>
<p>I think that there is something to be said for having free time, one last care-free summer where you can explore the surrounding areas of your town or city, read, draw, paint, hike or do anything else that appeals to you. Even with my free summer, I didn’t get to do that, and I wish I did. I work full-time now, and I WISH I had a summer vacation, especially for trave, even if it’s just local by bus/train and on budget or outdoor activities.</p>
<p>I just think we are missing something when there is no down time.</p>
<p>Most school expect students to earn money summers to contribute to their college expenses.
Yes there is something to be said for vacations, but if you don’t earn money in the summer, that is more money that you will have to come up with another way.</p>
<p>It is your choice whether to fund that cost by taking out loans ( & paying interest) or taking responsibilty for your expenses by earning some of the money up front.</p>
<p>I hire new college graduates, and definitely prefer to see ones that did some type of work in the summers, then nothing meaningful. </p>
<p>My D completed her freshman year and is working full time at a resident camp this summer. Camp does not start until mid-June, so she is planning on working part time as a subsitute teacher. She knows that next year she will need to look for a ‘real job’ for the summer, but she can always do camp if she is unable to find something.</p>
<p>acollegestudent, yes it would be ideal to sit in splendour appreciating art, etc but the OP obviously has a parent without unlimited funds. It isn’t about one future internship, but about a tight job market. She has been given creative volunteer ideas to use her skills and also has been encourage to work in order to afford desireable summer internships on campus the following years since her guilt-tripping custodial parent can’t afford paying for her to remain on campus all year long. </p>
<p>No one may have asked you about you freshman summer because you had a resume that showed that you didn’t just “do nothing”. Maybe a crappy summer job isn’t ideal, but there have been other suggestions that relate to either chosen profession or would demonstrate that she used her talents to benefit others, such as working on a political campaign, volunteering as a cartoonist, use communication skills to help a non-profit, etc. </p>
<p>I also hire, and gaps in a resume always make me concerned, even for generally unskilled positions.</p>
<p>I agree with the others who think you’d be bored. Will you have friends to “do nothing” with or will they be working? Crappy jobs are character building and will give you something to lord over your kids when they are in college. My dad worked as a trash man while in college…Never heard the end of that 
Plus, summer job will leave you plenty of time to do nothing, and money to do nothing with.</p>
<p>If you have the skills, offer your services as a math tutor. It pays well, is part time, can be fun, and it shows maturity. My son tutored college students off and on throughout high school and made $25 an hour with a 12 hour minimum. I made all the arrangements for his own safety and accompanied him as he tutored in the library or a coffee shop or fast food place.</p>
<p>I vote for taking a part time job and enjoying your last summer of freedom. There is something to be said about stepping back from the rat race and evaluating your goals and future direction. I too will not hire a new college grad unless they have held a paid menial job at some point in their HS/college journey. In fact, they don’t even make the interview cut. I think there is a lot to learn from this type of job in terms of responsibility, boredom, humility and working with the public. If a kid has internships that look too good to be true I always have someone else phone screen them with the objective of finding out how much their parents helped them versus what they were able to accomplish on their own. It is OK for the parent to help open the door the first time but it should be up to the kid to parlay that that into something else.</p>
<p>Some of the most fun I ever had was during those summers of “crappy jobs” during college summers. </p>
<p>It was a long time ago, and I don’t recall the words “summer internship” EVER crossing the lips of ANYONE. You just went home or stayed in your college town because you had an apartment, and you found the best paying job you could. None of them were ever directly related to our ultimate professions. Maintainance crew on the college campus, concessions at a river tubing business, general schlump at the local pool… Just a few of the fine summer college jobs I held. Had an absolute blast at work and after work at every one of them. </p>
<p>Sorry I sound like a crabby old person, but sheesh. What a silly assumption that anyone without a trust fund gets a summer off.</p>
<p>I have always thought that a big gaping hole of “must have spent the summer at the beach or playing video games because there is nothing on that resume for three months” is a huge liability. “House Sitter/ Baby Sitter/ Dog Walker”, or “Volunteer Somewhere”, or, well, anything, is better. </p>
<p>If you were my child, I’d give you a couple of days to decompress on the couch, and then out the door you go… Find a job, or take some classes, or volunteer somewhere.</p>
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<p>There’s a huge number of people that would like that crappy, minimum-wage job right now.</p>
<p>Take a look at the employment report this morning to see how dismal things are right now. We’re creating about 1.5 million jobs a year. There are several million new graduates coming on the labor market every year along with teenagers with no college, older folks, middle-aged folks also looking for work.</p>
<p>I worked part-time and summer jobs starting at 14 (my first job was at 11), and I got a lot of great experiences out of those jobs. Sure, they didn’t pay much but I got to meet lots of people and was given responsibilities for all kinds of things and I was well familiar with the working world which made it pretty easy to find a job in a time when there was very high unemployment.</p>
<p>Freshman summer, D1 “worked from home” for someone we knew. I think she worked 20 hours a week, often in front of our TV watching a show with me. She did a lot of tutoring the month of May to help kids with their finals. It was the last summer D1 had a relaxing summer. She went to the shore a lot with friends, and we had a lot of quality time. </p>
<p>If you could afford it, do some part time work, and you could still have a lot of time to do what you want. You could take few weeks off in the beginning and end of your summer. You are right, there won’t be that many more carefree summers.</p>
<p>My kids loved their summer camp jobs, unfortunately,residential summer camps don’t pay much. They both found they had to find ones that paid more eventually. My oldest also took that opportunity to take courses at the community college that her small LAC didn’t offer, but would accept credits from. This gave her some leeway during the school year to work/study.
Youngest lives off campus, so she stays in her college town. She is also going to be enrolled for summer qtr again ( last summer, she did an overseas research program), but also working at a camp the university runs.</p>
<p>I expect both of them still manage to get quite a lot of enjoyment out of their summers.
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