When it comes to the teenage workforce, there’s no place like summer camp. Find out what kind of skills and joyful experiences your teen can pick up as a camp counselor.
Julia Barry is a senior at Grant High School in Northeast Portland. She likes reading, writing, and playing trumpet in the school’s jazz band. She just finished applying to colleges. And she has applied for a job as a camp counselor at Camp Westwind this summer and is waiting to hear if she has landed the job. Although Julia was hesitant at first to spend her last summer before college on the Oregon coast, away from home, she made her decision.
“I just know I’ll get a lot more out of being a counselor than doing the same thing I do at home the rest of the year — it’s such a unique experience you can’t get anywhere else,” she says.
Many Portland-area summer camps build upon a legacy of outdoor education, with a focus on wilderness survival or old-school camp traditions. Others are doing something totally new.
And the experience is just as enriching for the teen camp counselors as it is for the kids they guide. Here are the experiences, skills and all-around life lessons teens gain as counselors over the summer.
Benefit for Your Teen: Competence
One of the most obvious benefits of wilderness-focused summer camps like Camp Westwind and Trackers Earth are the hands-on skills counselors and campers learn. While kids may use few of the esoteric skills like lock-picking, blacksmithing and wildlife tracking in everyday life, Trackers founder Tony Deis says there’s a level of competence and care in everything counselors and experienced campers do that transfers to life outside of camp. People from other camps echo this sentiment.
“Working in a tight knit community like that,” adds Camp Westwind Program Director Laura Chase, “they hold you accountable to showing up each day and working hard. … I appreciated that from a young age — giving it my all every day because I knew other people were.”
Benefit for Your Teen: Confidence
Confidence is the No. 1 skill young people pick up on the job as a counselor. Perhaps this is because the camp environment is an especially supportive one.
“You can go in knowing nothing,” says Jess Ellefson (pictured above), who started working for Portland Parks & Recreation (PP&R) at age 15, “and you feel fully supported.”
She says the job taught her to be responsible, and she learned other practical skills that boosted her confidence — how to project her voice, how to deploy “attention getters,” how to schedule out a day. Now 25 years old, Ellefson still works for PP&R — only now she’s instrumental in programming and curriculum decisions for the Southwest Community Center.
Chase, who left Camp Westwind for a life abroad before returning to become its program director, remembers taking her camp counselor skills with her to college. She felt comfortable presenting, working in group projects, advocating for her needs and talking to professors when things would come up. “It was the confidence of being able to figure things out,” she says.
“I feel pretty prepared,” says Julia as she awaits the results of her Camp Westwind counselor application. She took two leadership programs with Westwind that taught hands-on skills like conflict resolution and managing behaviors. And the assistant role she took on last summer helped her understand the transition she’d be making.
Benefit for Your Teen: Work Experience
Any job will fill a line on your resume, but camp jobs seem to offer experiences that meaningfully equip alumni to channel their qualifications toward their next goal in life.
Reetu Agnihotri (pictured above, right) started volunteering at age 16 at Camp Yakety Yak, a special needs day camp in Lake Oswego, to fulfill a service requirement for Jesuit High School. Now she’s studying political science and psychology at Boston College and says, “I talk about my time at Camp Yakety Yak in every internship interview.”
By her second and third year volunteering at Camp Yakety Yak, Reetu had stepped up as an intern, where she focused on her interests, like writing the camp’s blog. Now, while working on her minor in marketing, Reetu says she talks about the marketing strategies she used for the blog, plus the collaboration and teamwork she learned from volunteering, to shape her resume. (Last summer was the first year she didn’t volunteer with the camp because she was busy with a summer internship with the Oregon Department of Justice’s Bias Response Program.)
Another great bonus of working as a camp counselor: the pay. Most camps we researched offer a starting rate above minimum wage, even for the youngest hirees at entry-level roles. Some rates are harder to calculate, especially for overnight camps when the rates are weekly or daily, not hourly. But the overnight camps provide room and board, and there may be something to be said for making money while in an environment where you can’t spend it.
Benefit to Your Teen: Connection to Nature
Connecting to nature at a young age instills a deep-rooted love for the world around us, or as Trackers founder Tony Deis calls it, “the more-than-human world.”
Sustainability and stewardship are core values for outdoor camps. “We show campers the beauty of nature, first of all, and how cool it is to be in a pristine natural area so they have that understanding that, like, keeping areas like this is valuable,” says Julia. “I think it’s also so incredible for your mental health, spending an entire summer outside. It’s like a detox from normal life. … It narrows your world in a way, while also expanding it.”
Benefit to Your Teen: Adaptability and Fun
When you’re dealing with nature, you already can’t control everything. And then you add the chaos that is children. “Nothing ever goes to plan ever,” says Julia (pictured above). “You have to learn to roll with the punches.”
A passion for working with youth is a must. No waffling on this point. Teen counselors are in charge of younger kids without their parents around. “Hanging out with kids, you get to be a kid, but you have responsibility, which is a really good feeling, too,” says Julia. “You prove to yourself that you have the ability to take care of kids who have complex, individual, unique needs.”
After spending a summer learning what it takes to be a camp counselor, Julia is also realizing something about the counselors she looked up to, who always seemed like they were having so much fun: “None of it was fake, like, I am having as good of a time as they think I’m having.”
We’re happy to report that Julia will be spending her last summer before college at Camp Westwind, getting paid to do one of the best jobs ever on 529 acres of protected Oregon coastline. Yes, she got the job.
Pro tips: Advice for finding a teen camp counselor gig
- Your teen not feeling confident in their leadership skills? Look for training programs like Trackers Leader-in-Training camps, Camp Westwind’s Teen Leadership program, or Bird Alliance of Oregon’s Green Leaders school, a partnership with Hacienda CDC.
- Yes, a parent can be a job reference! Jess Ellefson from PP&R says without her knowing, her dad contacted PP&R after she applied and told them he thought she would be really great at this job. She got the job, and her dad was right, she is good at it.
- Does your teen want a test run? Some day camps like Camp Yakety Yak welcome short-term volunteers, so teens can choose to volunteer for a week and get an idea if this type of work is right for them without a huge commitment.
- Does your teen love the outdoors, but is unsure about spending the whole summer outside? Look for day camps in the city — with Portland Parks & Recreation, for example, they could spend their days at the park and their nights in the comfort of their own home.
Wilderness just not your teen’s thing? There are specialized youth camps tailored to different interests: art camps, theater camps, STEAM camps, music camps, camps centered around religion and identity … search and you may find. Ask about job opportunities directly.