What Should My Kid Do This Summer? Wrong Question.

Every spring the same question arrives from every direction. What should my student do this summer? It is the wrong question, and the families who ask a better one get better falls.

The wrong question produces program shopping. Parents compare camps and courses the way they compare hotels, by prestige and by what the neighbors booked, and students come home in August with a certificate and nothing to say. We have read hundreds of activity lists over the years, and the summer entries that do nothing are almost always the expensive ones with famous names attached. The reader has seen that program four hundred times. The program is not the applicant.

The better question is what your student will be able to say in September. Colleges do not care where a summer happened. They care what the student did with it, and doing shows up in specifics, in something built, something run, or something measurably improved with a number attached to it. A teenager who spent June fixing the youth group’s broken signup process has more application material than a teenager who attended a leadership intensive, and it usually happened for free in the garage.

Two students made the point for us one July. Both spent the same July on robotics. One attended a well known program and described the curriculum. The other rebuilt a failing club at school, recruited nine freshmen, and could tell you what problem took three weeks to solve and what finally cracked it. Same summer, same field, entirely different result on paper, and the difference was never the setting.

So before anything gets booked, ask the September question out loud at dinner: what will you have done? If the honest answer is attended, keep looking. The best summer plans are usually smaller, closer, and cheaper than the ones in the glossy emails, and they end with a story only your student can tell.