Extracurriculars Too Good to be True

I recently heard that a friend’s son did a summer internship in a biomechanics lab at MIT. Another friend’s son worked at a hedge fund that makes socially conscious investments. I mentioned these things to my sister, who has two teenage boys. She immediately went into a panic about her own kids’ comparatively pathetic summer jobs: lifeguarding at a public pool and working with the town sanitation crew, respectively. Curious, and vicariously stressed for my sister, I got on-line and began furiously researching high school summer internships. Not surprisingly, I came up short - I literally could not find a single lead to a major research institution or large company hiring high school students for the summer, paid or unpaid. Why is this? Epiphany: my friends manufactured and arranged for these jobs for their kids.

We live in college-crazy times. To many, high school feels like one long series of credentialing exercises, all form and no substance. We’re all doing our best to try to help our kids get ahead. But what initially struck me as dazzlingly incredible - adult-sounding jobs with awesome titles - is really just another aspect of helicopter parenting. These positions might sound impressive to someone who doesn’t know better, but to college admissions officers they look pretty hollow. As a practical matter, most name-brand organizations aren’t set up to create meaningful and challenging opportunities for kids. They’re businesses. And for that reason there’s a decent chance that your kid won’t get much out of it in terms of learning and personal growth either.

Now I’m not knocking the impulse to help our kids get ahead by landing them cushy summer jobs. If I had receptive friends with jobs in areas that interested my kids I too might try to facilitate internship opportunities. But lately I’ve started thinking more about the benefits of authentic, age-appropriate jobs. My sister’s kids applied for and were hired for their jobs on their own. I’m not going to pretend that the process for either was arduous, but she didn’t do a thing to help. They learned about the opportunities through word of mouth. Then after repeated and sometimes angry reminders from their parents they filled out the applications, and followed up. Their summer jobs weren’t very interesting, but they paid. And they were hard work, requiring them to get out of bed on time, dress appropriately, behave like adults, and take responsibility for something. So although summer garbageman (or “waste management professional”) might not sound flashy on a college application, there’s no question that it’s authentic.

This is really a meta-point about what the college application process has become. It’s a frenzy, and a multi-billion dollar business, and it’s easy to get caught up in the nonsense. But if you step back for a minute and think about things rationally, things that sound too good to be true usually are. If your instinct is to roll your eyes when you hear about something superhuman that someone else’s child has done, chances are pretty good that an admissions officer that reviews thousands of applications a year is having the same reaction. Our kids have so little time for personal growth amidst the pressures of high school, we should make sure that their summers count. It’s a double mark against them to lose that opportunity, and for their resumes to be filled with transparently empty credentials. Think about what jobs kids are capable of finding, applying for and performing on their own. If your kid needs to get on a train, or a plane, to get to work, it’s probably not an office job he nabbed on his own. My rule of thumb for summer jobs: if it’s not local, it’s loco!