Planning A Meaningful Sophomore Summer: Mentor Experiences

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What I Did On My Summer Vacation - Mentor Experiences

"I stayed on campus at M.I.T. the summer after my sophomore year," Erik recalled, "and worked in my dorm making a very high hourly wage doing menial work in a position affectionately known as 'grunge.' It was essentially a dorm maintenance position, as the dorm turns into a hotel of sorts over the summer. A team of four to six students remain on staff for forty hours a week to serve as glorified housekeepers for the guests of the dorm. So that was me.

"When those housekeeping duties were fulfilled, we performed maintenance and repair functions throughout the building. Again, it was as basic a summer job as was humanly possible on the M.I.T. campus, but it paid very well and a few of my friends were staying to do the same thing, so I acquiesced. Of course, I would not at all consider this a summer spent wisely, nor would I recommend that you work any job known as 'grunge' during your sophomore summer.

"Instead, I would strongly recommend that you seek a relevant internship or ap­prenticeship within your field of interest, even if it means having to work for free. The experience you will get and the contacts you will develop, along with your ability to impress your superiors by working hard even though you are working for free, is extremely valuable if you are looking to set yourself up."

"I left West Point at the end of my sophomore year," Aaron noted. "That summer was a major transition time for me. I needed to take time to regroup and figure out what I wanted and what my next step was going to be, so I got a job as a carpenter, and at the same time, worked on transferring to UMass Amherst. It was a summer well spent because I used it to reevaluate how things were going in my life and I used the time to set goals for myself and to begin taking the steps to achieve those goals. I think the most effective and valuable way to spend your summers in the college years is to use them to constantly examine your life and how happy you are and to use the built-in breaks to make any necessary changes."

"I waitressed at a restaurant back out in Wyoming," Carolyn said, "but I wish that I had spent the summer more wisely. I should have used the summer to ex­plore potential career options either through volunteer work, an internship, or something of the sort in a field I might have been interested in pursuing as a career. This summer was a wasted opportunity for me."

As you are seeing, sophomore summer is a kind of netherworld. You're not yet an upperclassman focused on "what comes next," but you're not still an underclassman who can claim naivety and inexperience either. And the result is that a lot of us got caught up in this indecision and failed to take advantage of what might have been a valuable learning opportunity.

"I took the low road, too," Zoe admits. "Perhaps as an extension of my Sophomore Slump, I procrastinated on deciding what to do for the summer, and at the last minute, made a weak decision. I had a job interview scheduled for a position working with migrant farm workers doing translating and support activities with a nonprofit. This fit in perfectly with a lot of my interests and skills and would undoubtedly have been an opportunity to learn a lot and make some good contacts. Inexplicably, the morning of the interview, I called and cancelled, and later that week moved to a resort town in Maine to waitress. Although I made good money waitressing, I wasn't very happy or fulfilled. Worse, I was plagued with the sense of having copped-out and missed a great opportunity. The silver lining was that I recognized what a lame series of decisions I had made and I don't think I've made the same mistake since."