Student Blog: Home for the Summer

Ah, summer. The time for college students to find the perfect job or internship to further their career aspirations, have the picturesque summer break that everyone longs for, and arrive back to school in August refreshed, relaxed, and ready for another semester with a couple of new entries on their resumé. 

Oh, wait, no—that’s just what we see on Instagram and LinkedIn. For some people, summer will look exactly like that. But for the rest of us, summer is a time to rest and recuperate, a time to be at home with loved ones and catch up with friends and family who we haven’t seen in a while and make some money by finding a summer job or two. 

The latter is where I’ve found myself this summer, but I’m excited for it. After a crazily busy first year at the University of Pennsylvania packed with theater, newspaper reporting, and finding my people, I’ll be home for the summer in the good old suburbs of Philadelphia. I’ll be working with kids a lot this summer, at two different day camps in my area, both of which I once attended. The first is your typical summer day camp: sports, swimming, constant outdoor activity, and an Oracle walking stick given out each day to the camp group with the most spirit. It’s a place that gave me mostly happy memories when I was a camper there in elementary and middle school, and although there were some slightly traumatic moments (your classic helmet-gets-stuck-on-a-rock-wall moment—no major injuries, but scary nonetheless!), I’m excited to work there this summer. 

The second camp is one I didn’t discover till I was in high school, and I wish I had known about it sooner and gotten a chance to spend more summers there. It’s a theater camp at a family-owned performing arts center just ten minutes from my house, and it’s filled to the brim with some of the kindest, most enthusiastic theater lovers I have ever met. I was a camper there for one brief, two-week session the summer after my freshman year of high school, worked as a Counselor in Training for the past two summers, and am now on the paid staff as an assistant director for the youngest kids’ performances. I cannot wait to take on this new level of leadership at this organization: although I haven’t been part of this organization’s community for long, they strive to make every student and staff member who walks through the doors feel like a member of their family, and they’ve certainly achieved that with me. 

That’s part of what summer is about: family. Whether it be your biological family, the family you find through the cast of a show, or your friends who become your chosen family, you want to spend your summers with people who make you happy. I’m excited to be doing that this summer. 

Who knows what else I’ll end up doing! Life tends to find ways of throwing new things my way, and I’m up to the challenge. I’m debating whether to audition for a summer stage show, I’m a summer reporter for Penn’s newspaper, and…what else…oh yeah, starting a pretty cool gig as a student blogger for BroadwayWorld. 

I’m so excited to see what my first summer of college is going to hold, and I can’t wait to share it and everything I learn along the way!