August 3, 2022
This is not a scientific poll by any stretch of the imagination. But I reflected on how three of my college-age grandchildren spent their summers this year and compared it to what I and my friends did for summers while attending college over sixty years ago.
We had one goal: to get a job to pay for tuition, room, and board for next year at the university. My grandchildren had loftier goals: do something interesting, educational, and even exciting, while making money. Big difference in aspirations! Is this true? You be the judge.
OK. So what did I and my friends do when we were at college? To pay for the cost of attending university the next year, we took the first job we could get. The emphasis was on getting a job, any job. We did not think about fun activities.
Looking for a job in my first year at university, I had a couple of false starts. One was strawberry picking on the lower mainland of British Columbia, where the stench of the accommodation and backbreaking work all day finished my enthusiasm in one week. The other false start was my unsuccessful career selling Collier’s encyclopedia in small towns along the Fraser Valley to poor people. After these attempts, I was successful in getting a sustaining job: I settled into a summer of dish-washing at the Essondale Mental Hospital. Boring as dickens but steady and paid well. The mental patients ribbed me about seeing me doing “women’s jobs”. But I lived at home and could save all my earnings.
Other jobs followed in subsequent years. I was happy to be hired by a survey crew where I did machete work in the wilderness of Vancouver Island’s interior, memorable for the cloud of deer flies and mosquitoes. When I complained, they assigned me to work inside, where I experienced the most boring job of my life: drawing cross-sections for a highway from survey data. Each drawing took a few minutes; plot seven dots on graph paper and connect the dots. I decided never to be a draftsman for a survey crew.
One highlight of this job was that I learned to like and drink beer (in retrospect, this may not have been a positive highlight). We drank beer in the hotel pub at night, having nothing else to do. I learned to gulp down a glass of beer by holding the glass with my teeth and knocking my head backward while opening my throat. Most nights ended with the natives joining us and getting into a rumble that I avoided at all costs.
I left the survey crew in a haste on my last day, after hearing the crew members talking about teaching the “college boy” about real life by stripping me and inserting my private parts into an anthill.
So what do college kids do today? My grandson Cedric showed up at the cottage in Elgin, ON, after a 3000-mile bicycle ride from Portland OR. He is an engineering student at Oregon State University (in Corvallis) and decided to cycle coast to coast before taking on a summer job. What a great physical and educational adventure! And potentially dangerous, too.
Among his many observations he related, he found the prairie people more friendly and curious than west coast people and discovered coffee at Tim Hortons in Canada much hotter than McDonald’s in the US. He avoided places where people looked at him with suspicion, but also met many friendly folks who let him camp overnight in their yard.
He used the “warm showers community” website in his travels, where people offer a welcoming hot shower and a place to bunk down, to cyclists. What first-hand experience learning about your country!
My thoughts circled back to Cedric and his financial situation and how he could afford to spend six weeks cycling and not working. I recalled that last summer he did fire-fighting in Idaho and saved money: accommodation and food were provided in tents in the wilds of Idaho. They were paid for sixteen-hour days and there was no place or time to spend money. They worked in fourteen-day stints, then were off for two days before another fourteen-day session started. For Cedric, it was another amazing educational and well-paying experience as well.
Here is another example of what students do for a summer job today. Not satisfied with repeating a job as a cashier in a grocery store, my granddaughter, MaryKate, created her summer job. With friends from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where she is a student, they secured accommodation from the friend’s family to stay at their cottage in upstate New York. Then they took training in whitewater rafting and obtained a job with ARO, an adventure class white water outfit in Watertown NY. Another great experience! When MaryKate did not work at the white water center, she worked at the local grocery store. She created her job!
One final example is how another grandson, Alec, parlayed three seasons of fun-filled sailing camp experience in Ottawa, Canada, into teaching sailing to disadvantaged children on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. All I heard from Alec during the summer sailing camps was the fun they had turtling (turning the sailing boat upside down), but obviously, they also learned to sail!
Alec negotiated his accommodation in New Orleans by sleeping on a boat belonging to a friend. It had never entered my mind that summer camps can provide skills making you able to get into the workforce.
Yes, three examples do not form a valid sample. Despite that, my cohort, over sixty years ago, had much more pedestrian jobs. Why? I can only speculate that the children today live more in the present and try to maximize their opportunities. As well, they have more confidence. What are your thoughts on this subject?
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