March 2003

Parent to parent: Summer plans

By Mom Marion

March is the month when summer starts peeping around the corner, like a child waiting to be called to dinner. For parents, it's the month when we ask our college students with growing urgency, "What are you planning to do this summer?"

For most students at UC Davis, freshman year is the only year when they aren't locked into a lease. This means that the pull to stay on campus is not particularly strong this summer, and your student has an incredible number of options of what to do.

When I was the parent of a freshman, I was not eager to embrace all those options. I was glad my child wasn't tied to campus, because I wanted her home. A job sounded like a good idea to me, a way to recover a bit of the money that pumped out of our house like a broken water main during the school year.

I did want her to be learning something, but I didn't care what. She told me she would look for a job as a waitress, and I was satisfied.

As summer drew closer, however, I started hearing about other students' plans. Many were seeking resumé-enhancing occupations, and the word "internship" became as insistent as "SAT review course" during the last years of high school. I wondered if my daughter's simple plans were a mistake.

Then she came home, exhausted after a freshman year that had been far more stressful than I realized. She had a hard time living 3,000 miles from home, but I suspect that her desire to return to the nest was shared even by freshmen who hadn't traveled very far. In her first weeks home, old high-school friends kept gathering at my house, scattering to the job search, and returning again, like a group of pick-up sticks, tossed apart and then reassembled. Time with each other seemed very important.

Meanwhile, my daughter discovered that it's hard to get a job waiting tables without experience, so she settled for cashier work at a local restaurant. She soon learned that the most valuable workers were the cooks, all immigrants. She learned that managers come and go, even in the space of a summer, and that getting good hours depends on them. She learned that customers can be nasty, and she still talks about the woman who imitated her face while doing math and said, "You're too dumb to add."

My daughter learned about irrationality, inequity and hard work. She already knew that large chunks of a paycheck disappear in mysterious governmental categories, but she felt it more vividly after long hours on her feet. Most important, I noticed that the year of college had given her language to describe what she was seeing at work and increased her ability to reflect on the effects of class, gender and race.

Two years later, I can tell you that it didn't matter that she passed up internships, travel abroad or advanced courses. She has done some of that since, and she learned that it's much easier to land summer work in your field when you're older and have begun your major.

To parents, I say "It's OK to view summer of freshman year as free choice, no special achievement required, money would be nice." The amazing, transitional, mind-stretching first year of college primes students to learn from whatever they do.

Newspaper columnist Marion Franck is the mother of a college junior and high-school senior. She has worked with UC Davis students as a lecturer.

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