Is It Too Late to Figure Out a Summer Plan?

If you're reading this in the middle of the summer and feeling like you missed the boat on “serious” summer opportunities, you're definitely not alone.

Maybe you’re a sophomore who has SAT prep lined up five mornings a week, but nothing planned in the afternoons. Or perhaps you're volunteering on the weekends, or attending a camp for a week or two, but beyond that, you don't have anything that feels like it's building toward your interests or future goals.

Or perhaps you tried your best to get into a certain summer program or snag an internship and didn’t get what you’d hoped for. If you've spent any time on Reddit pages like r/ApplyingToCollege, you've probably seen plenty of students asking some version of the same question: "Did I screw things up by not doing X this summer?” It’s true that many of the highly structured summer opportunities for research or internships like ASSIP, TASP, and SEAP are highly selective and have application timelines that fall months before summer actually begins. But one of the biggest misconceptions students have about summer is that prestigious opportunities are necessary for admission to top colleges, when in reality, what often matters much more is whether you're willing to take initiative with the time you have.

Just because summer’s already begun doesn’t mean you’re actually out of options. Here are a few tips for how you can start thinking creatively about what a meaningful summer experience can look like.

Start by Looking Around You

It’s no secret that colleges are focused on impact more than ever — just look at the mission, values, and vision statements of your favorite schools if you want to know what they care about in their future graduates (check out Harvard, Duke, and UChicago for a few examples). In practice, that means they don’t just want to see that you’re a good student and participant, but someone that can notice gaps in your field of interest, whether that’s using your coding and fintech skills to create an app to serve first-generation immigrants (as one of my former students did), or sharing your love for swimming with underserved populations.

As we discussed in our recent design thinking series, many meaningful projects don't begin with a grand idea. They begin with observation. Once you start paying attention to what people around you actually need, it becomes much easier to identify opportunities to help. Maybe there's an organization in your community that struggles to recruit volunteers, and you can offer to create a volunteer database. Maybe younger students in your area don't have access to mentorship or academic support, and you start a new initiative focused on developing a digital tutoring resource bank to distribute in local libraries.

Yes, time might be limited, but it’s never too late to start and utilize the flexibility that summer offers. It’s not likely that you’ll be able to solve a major social problem before August, but you CAN get started by noticing where there might be a genuine need and asking yourself what you could realistically contribute. So challenge yourself to get out of thought and into action.

Go Beyond the High School Classroom

Many students I’ve worked with assume that for a summer course to be valuable, it has to be located on a prestigious college campus. While these programs are a great opportunity for the students who can attend them, they can also be cost-prohibitive for some families and often fill up early in the summer. However, if you get creative with opportunities at local universities, community colleges, and online programs, you can craft an incredibly meaningful summer closer to home.

The key is often having a goal or plan for implementation. This comes from looking at what skills you need to understand your field of interest, and then getting creative about how you go about seeking them out. You could spend a few weeks getting trained to become a volunteer EMT at your local firehouse to get experience understanding the medical field. You might consider taking a coding course through a local community college in order to create an app related to an issue you care deeply about. Or you could spend your summer pursuing a Coursera certificate on political theory to get practice in critical writing for next year’s John Locke Global Essay Prize.

One surprising benefit students often discover is that local opportunities can offer more ownership and continuity than larger, more structured programs. You might get closer to your professors and be able to keep doing research with them during the school year, for example, or find a local instructor willing to become a mentor. So don’t get discouraged if you end up staying local — there is much to discover in your own backyard.

Take the Time to Talk to Adults

I’m always surprised by how many students know exactly what career they want to pursue, but have never actually spoken to people they know in that field. An informational interview is a great way to spend the time you have to learn more about your field of interest and get more insight into the skills, values, and abilities that you need to excel in future opportunities.

The hard part? Making the ask. It can feel intimidating to talk to adults, especially in an unstructured format like an informational interview. But the secret is that most adults are actually really excited to talk about their careers when given the opportunity. The key is to start with the most familiar, comfortable people in your circle and then move outwards from there. That might mean reaching out to a family friend who's an engineer, asking your pediatrician if they’d be open to answering a few questions about healthcare, or talking to a local business owner about what they actually do day-to-day.

Will everyone say yes? Probably not. But some will, and you’ll get practice making the most of these conversations, which will help to prep you for the harder interviews down the line.

So challenge yourself to talk to five people in your career or area of interest before summer ends, and make sure to practice the art of a quality thank-you afterwards. And remember that even when these conversations don't lead directly to an internship or formal opportunity, they can help you understand what you might want to pursue in the future.

Think About Where You're Trying to Go

While much of this article has focused on specific projects and initiatives you can start, summer can also be a good time to step back and ask deeper questions about your personal direction that you don't have time to think about during the school year. Maybe you realize you aren’t even sure what majors are of interest to you. Or you know that you want to go into medicine, but you’re not sure what to do beyond med school.

Maybe you're planning to take AP Calculus this fall but know that certain topics in pre-calculus never felt completely comfortable. Or perhaps you're interested in CompSci but feel like you’ve never really learned to code, even though you’ve taken AP Computer Science. Or you think you want to pursue research, but have never actually spent time reading academic papers in a field that interests you outside of class assignments.

So many of these skills don’t require formal educational spaces thanks to the wonders of the internet, and one of the biggest advantages of summer is that it gives students an opportunity to focus on learning without the pressure of grades.

So if you have the free time this summer, don’t let it go to waste. Get ahead on fall coursework. Conduct your own research and submit to local journals. Code just for the sake of it. While it’s easy to discount this kind of independent preparation as not as “intensive” as a formal program, it’s way more valuable than spending the summer fretting about what you’re not doing. So take the next best step, learn a skill, and then commit to figuring out how to apply it in the future.

Start Before You Feel Ready

One thing we've noticed over the years is that students often assume they need to have the entire summer figured out before they start doing anything meaningful. In reality, a lot of students who end up having interesting and impactful summers don't start with a fully formed plan at all.

They reach out to a family friend and ask to have a conversation about how they got started with their career. They gather a few friends together and plan to meet weekly about an initiative they want to kick off, and learn to pivot when their idea changes direction two or three times. Or they take on a mural project at their local elementary school, learning skills via YouTube and recruiting friends along the way. The one thing all successful students have in common is that they don’t wait for everything to go perfectly or to line up to get things going.

That's part of what makes summer valuable in the first place. During the school year, there's usually pressure to know exactly what you're doing and why. Summer often gives you a little more breathing room to experiment, change course, and figure things out as they go.

So if you're reading this in June or July and feeling like you've already missed your chance to have a meaningful summer, it's worth remembering that many students who ultimately have meaningful experiences don't necessarily start with a prestigious program or a perfectly organized plan. They start by paying attention to what's available to them, being willing to try something, and taking initiative with the time they have. And while it's absolutely worth thinking ahead for future summers, that doesn't mean this summer can't still become important, too.