It’s almost here-Summer break! The long awaited break from all those books, papers, and classes is just around the corner. As tempting as it may be to kick back and relax all summer long, you’ll probably find that after a week or two doing nothing gets really boring. This is why summer can actually be one of the most important times in a college student’s life! This is where you get to explore who you are outside of school, and sometimes even away from home!
Deciding what you want to do all summer can be a hard task. Maybe you have a job waiting for you back home, and you plan to make a little extra cash to get you through next year. Maybe your family wants to take a vacation to the middle of nowhere for a few weeks. Or maybe you’re one of those stellar freshmen who have already managed to line up an internship! Whatever you plan to spend the summer doing, there are a couple things to keep in mind for making the most of your summer!
First, vacations will mess up the timeline for just about anything else. It can be really hard to get a job or internship when you already know that you’ll be missing a set amount of time, but you don’t know when. For this reason, convince your parents to set dates for vacation well in advance. You can still take the time to spend time with your family, but you’ll also have a much easier time finding employment when you already know when you won’t be able to work. To make it extra easy, try to schedule vacations for the very beginning or very end of summer. You’ll be able to schedule your job around the vacation, instead of trying to get time off.
Second, internships are only as helpful as you make them. Everyone says internships will make or break your future career, and in some ways that’s accurate. However, it really depends on what field you’re going into, what internship you get, and how much time you spend there. For instance, if you’re an accounting major and you get an internship at a movie studio doing set work, that’s not going to be very helpful when you apply to major accounting firms. If you go home and work the books for a small local store, that’s going to be a lot more specialized experience, even though it isn’t an internship or with a really big, famous company.
Whatever you do this summer, keep in mind that you still have a few more summers to make the most of your college experience. If you plan things right, by the time you get out of college you’ll have a wealth of work experience and educational opportunities (like study abroad) to show exactly how much effort you put into getting ahead. By graduation, you’ll be a summer break pro!
