Summer Camp Isn’t Free From Teen Career Anxiety

High schoolers, nervous about how colleges view their work as counselors, are finding connections from VIP camp alums for internships and mentoring.

Takeaways

by Bloomberg AI

• Upscale summer sleepaway camps are touting their professional networks and creating internship-style programs for older kids serving in counselor roles.
• These camps want to position their networks as career accelerators that prepare teens for a competitive job market and help them build their résumés.
• Camps are hiring consultants and staff to strengthen their alumni base, teach job-hunting skills, and connect counselors with alumni to line up internships that stand out on college applications.

For counselors at today’s priciest sleepaway camps, roasting marshmallows by the fire now comes with a side of serious networking.

Parents who can afford to ship their teens to summer camp want them to have the best of both worlds: enjoying the outdoors without the fear of missing out on résumé-building opportunities. Upscale summer sleepaway camps, some of which cost more than $8,000 a month, are responding by touting their professional networks. Camps create internship-style programs for older kids serving in counselor roles, while introducing them to alumni throughout the year. Others are hiring consultants and staff to strengthen their alumni base or teach job-hunting skills.

The shift is defensive: High school teens who often fill counselor positions feel pressure to beef up their résumés to suggest that they did more than hang out by a lake all summer. And camps want to position their networks — and opportunities at camp — as career accelerators that prepare teens for a competitive job market. It’s one more perk for what’s often a low-paying gig. Keeping former campers as counselors also lets the camps rely less on costly international staff.

These teens feel the pressure. Aidan Lapatine, 18, is a bunk counselor at Camp Scatico in Elizaville, New York. He recalls networking with parents of campers during visiting weekend, when they arrived to check on their children at the camp in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City. He made sure his hair was smooth and walked around introducing himself to parents, many of them former campers happy to offer advice.

“I’d find out what they do for a living,” says Lapatine, who lives in Westport, Connecticut, and will attend Vanderbilt University this fall. He says he hopes that meeting parents face-to-face and knowing what they do will help in the next two years when he needs to land an internship.

Allison Wortman, co-director of Camps Baco and Che-Na-Wah, based in Minerva, New York, says the push for internship-like counselor experiences started after Covid-19. Counselors now participate in video calls with career consultants to help with résumé and interview preparation. The camp makes a point to connect them with college-age counselors before each session.

“We talk to them about what their major is. If they are studying marketing, maybe they want to help with ours,” Wortman says. The camp, where seven weeks costs families $14,975, is located in the Adirondack Mountains. It’s started to give older campers time off during the session to complete virtual internships. Summer pay starts at $2,000 for a college-age head counselor.

Wortman also connects counselors with alumni to line up the kinds of school-year internships that stand out on college applications. Securing internships ahead of time makes returning to camp more appealing, she says.

Given how competitive getting into elite US universities can be, admissions consultant Hannah Skaran suggests applicants leave their camp experience out of their application, even if they spent their last summer as a counselor.

“Admissions officers don’t want to see that you went to fancy sleepaway camps. They want to see that you participated in meaningful activities related to your academic passions and goals,” says Skaran, who works in Chicago for Ivy Coach. “Summer camps signal privilege.”

Nella McKasson, an 18-year-old incoming college freshman at the University of Washington, wrote in her college application about learning to overcome obstacles by climbing mountains while at camp. McKasson, who spent time as both a camper and a counselor at Sanborn Western Camps in Florissant, Colorado, says her last year as a junior counselor “felt almost like a leadership internship.”

McKasson, who is from Mission Viejo, California, says she didn’t feel as if Sanborn set her back. “I was never concerned about coming across as entitled,” she says. “If colleges were to focus on the fact that it’s a summer camp, they would have been missing the entire point of my story.”

This spring, Camp Scatico held a free networking event aimed at young alumni in New York City. More than 90 people attended a panel where older camp alums discussed their careers and how they’ve translated their experience to the professional world.

Director Nicki Fleischner, a fourth-generation owner of the camp, where tuition for seven weeks costs $13,900, plans to offer a similar event each year. Many of the attendees were one or two years out of college. Although alumni have always responded to camper requests for professional experience, “this was the first year where we decided to formally do something about it,” she says.

Kim Shyer, a professional recruiter, expanded her business to work with sleepaway summer camps this year. She’s now implementing internship-style programs and creating alumni day events during camp sessions.

At Island Lake Camp in Starrucca, Pennsylvania, Shyer introduced an internship program for 16-year-olds and above, along with two days of workshops to teach 15-year-old campers interviewing skills and how to utilize their camp networks for professional opportunities. “We look at it through the lens of career management,” she says.

Georgia Wainger Sussman joined Tripp Lake Camp in Poland, Maine, as a director of alumnae relations three years ago. The camp already had a database for alums, but it’s since created forums on WhatsApp and LinkedIn where they share opportunities, plus more in-person events.

Most recently, they’ve started profiling campers and counselors to showcase the kinds of internships and academic opportunities they’re getting two years before entering college. “We don’t want their camp experience to end when they are 16 years old,” says Wainger Sussman, who attended the camp and now has a child there.

Abby Rosenblatt, 23, spent seven summers at Tripp Lake. She says she broke into the restaurant business after Wainger Sussman provided her with a spreadsheet of every alum since the 1990s who worked in hospitality.

Rosenblatt went through the contact info and asked for a personal introduction to a handful of former campers. One set up regular Zoom meetings with Rosenblatt to aid with her job search. Ultimately the connection helped her land a job at a major restaurant group. “She really was my mentor, more than anyone from high school or college,” she says.

As camp costs have soared, administrators are starting to spell out these professional benefits with better marketing, while offering more formal opportunities. It helps justify the price tag, they say.

“Camps have to find a way to minimize their recruiting costs and continue to get people willing to pay this kind of money,” says Karen Meister, a Miami-based camp consultant. There are about 5,500 overnight camps in the US, according to the American Camp Association.

At Sanborn Western Camps in Colorado, director Ariella Randle Rogge says more older campers and counselors now ask for formal internship opportunities during the summer. Randle Rogge vouches for campers’ service hours and writes college recommendation letters, along with figuring out how to place campers in roles such as social media development or the health center.

As part of the camp’s alumni network, administrators also keep better track of parents’ professional networks to connect campers and counselors. “We have these relationships with families, and we become a trusted spoke in the wheel,” she says.