5 High Impact Ways for High Schoolers to Spend Their Summers
How to help your son or daughter make the most of the sunniest months.
Ah, summer. A time of carefree fun, pool parties, family vacations, and… wait, what year is this? Oh right, it’s 2023 and colleges want to know how students used all of their time. That’s right, even summer.
More than ever, admissions officers and parents alike are looking for ways to help their students engage in high-impact activities. These activities are not necessarily the most time-consuming but are nevertheless more likely to meaningfully contribute to a student’s profile, ensuring that a student’s precious time is well spent.
Here, we outline five such ways for a student to spend his or her summer that will be great additions to any resume while hopefully leaving a little extra time for your student to be a kid.
Get Experience. Attend a summer camp.
Attending a competitive summer camp or program is an awesome way to prove your interest in a subject, meet professors in your field of choice, and enhance your resume. However, not all summer programs have great admissions value. Let’s see the criteria for assessing a program’s value:
The application deadline. The earlier the deadline, the more competitive the program usually is. If the applications open early and are rolling admissions with no hard deadline, that doesn’t really count.
The number of essays and short answer questions required for the application. Top summer programs usually set the bar quite high for their applications and the essay is the best way to get a real look at the applicants.
The cost of the program. A number of the best summer programs cost next to nothing or even pay the students for their work. If the program is just two weeks long and costs thousands of dollars, it may not be worth it. There are some programs that are expensive but still competitive, and they give meaningful financial aid.
Dedicated threads about the camp on College Confidential. Usually, the competitive programs have threads for comparing application notes, talking about experiences attending, or general advice on essays.
Recommend camps from the admissions blogs of top universities or on their .edu domains. For example, MIT’s admissions blog has a great article about worthwhile math/science summer programs. Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth also has an exhaustive list of summer programs/internships that are categorized by field.
If you have determined that a program you’re looking at satisfies the above criteria, then it may be worth it to apply! Just make sure that your program supports some aspect of your Admissions Angle strategy. Going to an art camp will not necessarily help you get into an engineering program, for example.
Pro-tip: Check out Alex’s articles on the best summer programs for high schoolers, which are categorized by topic and available on The Admissions Angle blog.
Get involved. Support your local community with volunteer work or activism.
Admissions officers love seeing students who are involved in their school and local communities, but some involvement is more valuable than others. A community project has the most value when:
It relates to your Admissions Angle. If you are interested in psychology, what can you do to support mental health or a sensitive population? If you are interested in English, how can you work with your local library to support literacy efforts?
It requires leadership. Some community service requires very little skill or actual involvement. We call this “warm body” volunteering and such efforts include trash removal or beautification, showing up to build something, running a 5k, or raising money by way of your parents’ email contacts. This kind of volunteering isn’t bad, but it isn’t impressive to an admissions officer, who wants to see high-effort planning, delegation, and mobilization. If the project is scaleable, that’s even better!
It’s creative. Some community projects are very common, such as tutoring. You will make a big splash in the admissions office if your project is something they haven’t seen before.
Here are some examples of service projects with high admissions value:
A creative writing workshop series for elementary school students at a local library
Campaigning for a local proposition to support the unhoused population
Helping develop written materials for non-English speakers to do things like vote or access a resource
Build a mobile app that does something cool and useful, like collect and send petitions
Start a thinktank about a disability, condition, or public health concern
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