Every May, a version of this question arrives: “What should my son do this summer so it looks good?” It’s an honest question. The honest answer is that admissions readers have seen ten thousand summers engineered to look good, and they can tell.
What readers actually notice
Depth over variety, and continuity over novelty. A student who has worked the same lifeguard job for two summers and became the person who trains the new hires has a story. A student who did a one-week “leadership academy,” a one-week “medical immersion,” and a one-week service trip has a receipt.
The question an application reader is quietly asking is what does this student do when nobody assigns it? Summer is the clearest answer, because school isn’t assigning anything.
Three kinds of good summers
Work. A real job — retail, landscaping, a restaurant, a camp. It teaches showing up, being managed, and dealing with the public. Colleges respect it, and it’s one of the few experiences on an application that can’t be bought.
Depth in something the student already does. The musician who finally learns to record. The coder who ships one small thing other people use. The athlete who coaches the younger team. The “already does” part matters: it means the interest predates the application.
Something that connects to a possible career. Not a prestige program — a conversation. Ask a neighbor who’s a nurse if the student can shadow for a day. Ask the engineering firm down the road for an informational interview. Bucks and Montgomery counties are full of people doing interesting work who are flattered to be asked. Two or three of these conversations tell a sixteen-year-old more about what a career feels like than any brochure, and they show up later as specific, credible reasons for a major.
The one thing to plan before June
For rising seniors: writing time. Block a week in July for the personal statement. Not the whole summer — a week, with the prompts in front of them and nobody editing over their shoulder. The draft will be rough, and that’s the point; a rough draft in July becomes a good essay by September without anyone losing sleep.
For rising juniors: one honest conversation about the testing plan and one about money. Both go better in June than in the fall.
What parents can skip
The $6,000 pre-college program that promises “a taste of campus life.” It’s a pleasant summer camp. It doesn’t carry weight in admissions, and the money is better spent on the actual tuition it’s supposedly preparing for.
Summer should be chosen because it’s worth doing. That’s also, not coincidentally, what makes it worth writing about.
By Jeff Thompson, Phortex Campus · May 13, 2025 · ← All posts