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Health & Fitness

So Long Finals, Hello Internship...Or Europe?

Whether it's a trip to study abroad or a job at the local Nation's fast food joint, college students rarely seem to come home for summer just to take a break.

Summer means one thing for the average college student, and no one sums it up better than Alice Cooper. But for some, vacation no longer means staying up until four and sleeping until noon quite like it used to. With the title of an upcoming degree comes responsibility and the pressure to find a job, a task made all the more difficult by what feels like ever increasing competition for the most prestigious positions out there. This competition is growing at such a rapid pace that some are giving up on the internship idea altogether, opting instead to study abroad and shelve participation in the workplace for just a while longer.

I personally opted for the professional route this time around for reasons that, I feel, are somewhat institutionalized. But there seems to be a stigma against those who choose not to spend their breaks in the professional arena, and, economic factors aside, that is not quite fair. No matter the name of the school, college students work hard and are given vacations for the very purpose of relaxation. Because when August rolls around it’s back to the grinding stone for us all, and more sleep during the summer means fewer Five Hour Energies come midterms. Thus I envy those who choose to spend the warm months taking classes in Europe or South America, and I say that they may be interpreting the point of college better than anyone else.

But whenever I get caught up in this idea reality rudely slaps me in the face. Ultimately, most college students who work for the summer do so for financial reasons. No matter which way you slice it, school is expensive – increasingly so, in fact. If I had a dime for every time I heard a classmate take a job solely because it pays 25 cents above minimum wage…well, I wouldn’t need a summer job. There comes with the territory of the job hunt a basic message that money is gold, and whoever can pay the most is where you want to start your work experience. This comes close to defeating the purpose of the whole process, which, I always assumed, was to gain real life experience in areas unreachable during the academic year.

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Perhaps this financial pull is, in the end, a good thing. Because no matter the title – busboy, secretary, coffee guy – a summer job is a crucial real-world experience that college, as the total institution that it is, just cannot give us. While a summer abroad is an important cultural immersion, three months in the workplace is an introduction to the future that just might make post-graduate life a little less shocking when it finally arrives.

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