Most high schools will be letting out soon for summer. Maybe you’re one of those super-organized students who applied for half a dozen internships last February and now you have an amazing summer of research/travel/experience all lined up.
Or maybe you’re not.
Maybe you’ve arranged a fun summer job in a restaurant or retail or as a lifeguard at the pool or beach, where you’ll learn practical skills like promptness, diligence and how to get along with people you don’t really like, while saving money for college.
Or maybe you haven’t.
If you fall into the not/haven’t category, don’t worry! You can still have a rich and exciting summer full of learning and new experiences that will (as an added bonus) add depth to your college applications.
The possibilities, especially with the help of the internet, are almost limitless. Plan and carry out an advanced science project. Delve deep into a creative art you love. Interview the people in your neighborhood about their opinions on a specific local political issue. Get involved in a political campaign. Design a volunteer project to clean up a park or neighborhood.
What you do is up to you. However, how you do it can make a difference between how colleges will see it and whether or not you should include it on your college applications.
My advice:
- Commit to the project. A long-term, continuous project that you work on daily is more likely to produce worthwhile results than something you do at random times. Drawing up a schedule of what you plan to do and when you’ll do it can be very helpful – it’s fine to revise the schedule, but having a plan makes it much more likely that you will work on and complete your plan.
- Document. Keep a record of the hours that you spend on your project and how you spent them. This record gives you a view of your time and efforts stacking up that can feel very satisfying; it also makes it easy to estimate the hours you’ve put into the project if anyone asks. If you’re up for it, consider documenting your progress on a blog or social media.
- Involve others. As the project advances, it’s not a bad idea to reach out to people who are successful in the field – professors, artists, businesspeople, etc – and tell them about your project. Asking for advice is fine, asking specific questions that resonate with their own work (and can’t be easily found on Google) is even better.
Not everyone you approach will respond to you. People are busy, many don’t check their email, others genuinely aren’t interested. You’re most likely to hear back from someone you have a personal connection to – a friend or family member, a friend of a friend or family member, etc. Second best is someone local, who lives in your town or neighborhood. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reach out to well-known people, especially if your project is something that resonates with their own work or you have a reason to believe they might take a special interest in it. Just be realistic about your chances of getting a response.
- Involve others, part 2. When someone asks what you’re doing this summer, speak up. For one thing, it’s not a bad idea to practice summarizing your project and answering questions about it. For another, you never know who might offer you an unexpected idea or be able to connect you with someone who could help you.
- Have an end goal. What would you like to do with your project? Enter it in the science fair? Submit it to publishers? Share it online? Some projects, especially ones that involve a community, may have a natural culmination – if you’re organizing a neighborhood craft fair for August 8, well, on August 8, there will be a craft fair. But many others don’t. Think about the ways your project could be helpful to others, and how you could share it with them.
Strike the Write Note 