Un-organizing your summer

Career Services, I appreciate all the work you do for us, but seriously, you need a new line on your posters.

It might be a matter of taste, but I don’t think that 36 University Pl. should be advertised like a Sandals resort. Maybe you should go for something a little more honest like: “You paid $160,000 to come here. We’re going to help you make it back.”

But though these job genies might be helpful in securing summer internships and jobs, their help is something that freshmen really don’t need.

The freshman summer is our last summer, and everything has been set perfectly in place for us to make the best of it.

I believe that instead of the prestigious internship, freshmen should be doing community service projects, studying abroad somewhere (Princeton even offers the funds to do so), writing novels, going on road trips or finding any other activity where the central gain is enjoyment and not another line on a resume.

I say this not because I don’t care about my resume (I clearly do), but because I doubt that the freshman summer will contribute more than it sacrifices. Even if freshmen (and sophomores, though to a lesser extent) land impressive internships, employers are going to care comparatively more about applicable testing information, GPA, transcript, attraction of cover letter and maybe even recommendations than about freshman and sophomore summer experience.

The truth is that there is very little experience that can be garnered as a freshman. Many employers are only looking for juniors and seniors and, with some noted exceptions, the jobs that freshmen can find suggest little about their knowledge base or abilities. A freshman internship is a means to an end which may or may not improve the possibility of employment later on — but ultimately, it exists as a form of pre-preparation which, in my mind, wastes a summer that could have been enjoyed.

These few months that approach us represent an opportunity, golden for its infrequency, in which we can act without the intention to impress. I know that for those of us who have not been completely consumed by our ambitions — and there are plenty of us at Princeton — we can enjoy this summer as a unique set of time, free from the prevailing culture of striving.

I recall that only a year ago, my fellow freshmen and I enjoyed a similar lull. College decisions signaled an end to grade obsessions and extracurricular power struggles. For me, March 31 offered a brief vacation from my aspirations and began the happiest months of my life.

I wish that May 24 will give me anew what April 1 gave me: the freedom to enhance myself and not my resume. But what is so tragically funny about this freedom is the revelation it brings: We are better at writing resumes than living a life. Without a career or a college decision in mind, life seems void of the necessity to acquire prestige, money or prominence. It begs a fundamental question. What would we do if we didn’t have to do anything? It’s a question I don’t think I can answer because I’ve never been asked it or given it the consideration it deserves. It’s a question we should all be asking ourselves and using the freshman summer to answer.

Yet this summer, it seems that the only questions I will be answering will have unfilled bubbles.

As I work as an SAT tutor, I will be spending my summer caught between two competing forces: my busy ambition and my lazy clinging to childhood, not quite immersed in either. I think that this struggle is the defining quality of what David Brooks has called the “Organization Kid” — the kid who has been so conditioned to work that he loses sight of more important parts of life.

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While devoted singularly to the process of success, the Organization Kid never possesses a defined idea of what that might be. And this blind climb up Prestige Mountain offers a modicum of clarity: the Organization Kid is prepared for very little in this world.

It might just be that Organization Kids, like you and me, are only qualified for a world of college prep. The world beyond it, however, might require experience too many of us always neglected.

Peter Zakin is a freshman from New York. He can be reached at pzakin@princeton.edu.