3 Highly Important Lessons You Learn Working at Summer Camp

You chose to have the summer of a lifetime at camp… here’s the 3 important lessons you learnt.

1. You Learn the Value of Time and its Impact

7 weeks…

That’s all summer camp is, 7 weeks.

You have 7 weeks to make every second of the summer count.

There’s a classic summer camp saying that goes ‘the days are long, but the weeks never go by faster’ and before you know it, your campers are back on the buses home after an amazing summer.

What might surprise you is how much of a connection you’ve built with your campers in such a short space of time. You’ve been their older sibling, their mentor, their guide and their leader and now they’re leaving you for 10 months. The impact you have on them might not be visible all summer until they cry in your arms as you say goodbye or write you a bus note telling you how great you are. You will have helped in hundreds of different ways and they will be going home from summer camp feeling ten feet tall thanks to you.

And don’t think for one single second that they will not have had an impact on you too. You might not realize it now but you will in a few months or years time. You will learn a lot of lessons from a summer camp group of 8 year old boys, or 12 year old girls and every single lesson will have an impact on you. You will become more empathetic, nurturing and caring. You will learn about difficult conversations and the art of patience, how to deal with problems and that there is always a solution.

Time is everything at camp and you learn to make it count.

2. You Learn that Not all Superheroes Wear Capes

‘They say it takes a village to raise a child’

Well what does it take to raise a community of children?

Superheroes.

Another important lesson you learn working at summer camp is this… everyone relies on each other to make the vision a reality.

It works best with selfless teamwork.

Yes, it takes an amazing program team to schedule everything for the day, it takes group leaders to co-ordinate the bunks, and it takes camp counselors to make sure the campers are being safe and having fun… but it also takes the health center staff, the maintenance team, the kitchen crew, the security team, the operations team and every other team to work unselfishly for each other for the summer to be successful. In each and every team on camp there will be individuals who go above and beyond for others simply because they want everyone to have a good time.

These camp staff are the superheroes of summer. They are the ones who get up at 6am to cut the grass, the ones who make sure there is always fresh water on the courts, the people who volunteer to stay up late at night to make sure everyone is signed into bed… the list goes on.

You learn an important lesson in understanding teamwork, communication and above all, leading by example.

3. You Learn the Child in you Never Really Left at all!

When you’re a child you always dream about growing up.

Growing up meant staying up really late and doing whatever you wanted. It meant no more homework and being tall enough to reach the snack cupboard and a million other benefits.

Most grown ups reverse this thought process and dream of being a kid again.

Being a kid meant going to bed early, having your food cooked for you, spending all day playing with your friends and having no bills to pay.

It might sometimes seem like the grass is always greener on the other side… however…

What you learn (or realize) working at summer camp, is that the child inside you never really grew up at all, you just learnt how to hide your inner child from the public eye better.

Think about it… you simply swapped the playground for the gym, the hot chocolate one day changed to coffee and instead of building Lego you chose flatpack furniture from Ikea.

At summer camp the public eye is different, different social norms apply and you soon find that inner child again. Suddenly you’re singing and dancing in public without fear of judgement, you’re playing soccer with a group of 10 year olds or splashing about in the pool. You have a rest hour with milk and cookies!

There’s a feeling of childhood freedom that comes back to you and it’s really refreshing.

The important lesson you learn is that growing up shouldn’t mean that you stop having fun. By doing so you often discover more about who you are and what you’re capable of.

So there’s the 3 important lessons you learn working at summer camp — The importance of time, understanding selfless teamwork, and most of all… having fun will help you grow.

Tell us, what did we miss?