Yet the question that is so common now at the end of April delves more deeply into the realities of individual lives and the greater society that they comprise than its status as “small-talk” would incline one to assume. Summer is a time for jobs and internships, important for accumulating experience and telling of our economy’s vitality. Unfortunately, the need to accumulate experience and our economy’s fitness do not necessarily move in unison. The former is not a function of the latter — if the economy is in bad shape, you need to be qualified to get ahead, and if the economy is in good shape, you need to be qualified to get ahead. So the search for jobs and internships can, at certain times like the present one, be extraordinarily rough.
Of course, the College prides itself in its propensity to leave students in solid professional positions, and justifiably so. But this doesn’t mean its students are immune to the hardships of financial crises. We may be ahead of the game, but the rules have changed and even we must recognize that. For graduating seniors, the coming summer is the beginning of a long and arduous journey, and you probably aren’t being asked “What are you doing over the summer?” as much as you’re being asked “What are you doing with the rest of your life?” But for juniors, for whom this summer is the last which will precede another year at the College, the pressure is on to answer the questions about your summers by taking advantage of your educations, urgently.
The tone here is not intended to be didactic. I don’t mean to be saying that it’s the responsibility of the junior class to act despite the pressure. Rather, I’m saying that the pressure is on, I acknowledge it, and it sucks, not for the sake of some noble cause, but for your own sakes. Even as a mere first-year, I am disturbingly aware of this pressure and unnerved by the dark possibilities of what it might amount to by the time that the summer I am facing is my last as an Amherst student. I don’t want to victimize juniors, either. There might be grounds for a case that the students at an elite institution like the College are significantly more burdened than the students at an average institution for the sole reason that the expectations for the former group are higher, but this is not a case I want to make. There are, after all, so many unique burdens across the educational spectrum. To the students at the College, especially the junior class, I want only to say that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be demoralized by the claims of our “privileged” positions. Yes, we are privileged, but we have to fight for what we can get this summer, like everyone else, and we shouldn’t feel guilty or humiliated doing so. The rules have changed for us too.
Facing the summer immediately following my own first year, my scrambles for jobs and internships are probably not turning out to be all that violent, relatively. It’s still somewhat acceptable to stay at home and have an ordinary teenage summer job (right?). I am, however, still conscious of where I stand in the economy, even with a few undergraduate summers ahead of me which will likely be increasingly more influential for my future, at least in terms of my career. Every employer looks to past experience, but some experience has to be the first. Not that I didn’t work in high school, but that isn’t quite the adult professional experience desired in the notorious “real world.” Where am I going to start with the fight being as intense as it is?
In answering this question, I look to the words of a respected personal acquaintance who recently said to me something along the lines of “I don’t give a damn what you do, just do something.” There are scientific research positions I hear about all the time that I discard because I don’t have an established interest in science. Similarly there are language programs that I don’t participate in, financial internships that I don’t look into, environmental awareness projects that I don’t sign up for, all because they aren’t within my established realm of interests. Looking back at these dismissals, I am really quite ashamed at how childish I’ve been. Experience is always valuable, and should never be dismissed automatically by an inexperienced 18-year-old. Not being able to find the precise experience that I want should not mean that I pass on every experience altogether, especially under the current circumstances.
What this summer represents indeed may vary from the perspective of the first-year, to that of the sophomore, to that of the junior, and in case of a senior, it doesn’t even represent something quite comparable. For all of us, however, there’s a lot more to the summer than can be fit into the span of a courteous two minutes.