When someone scans your items at the supermarket or brings your food at a restaurant, it is an easy assumption that those people are simply doing their jobs; it’s rare to find someone who is passionate about scanning groceries or low-level work in the food service industry. When it comes to the job of camp counseling, most would probably assume the same thing: it’s just the means to a paycheck. For some that may be true, but for many, myself included, the paycheck is not the ends,…

As the counting of weeks before camp turns into the counting of days before camp, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on my choice to spend a second summer as a counselor at a sleep away camp. I believe it comes down to the fact that camp is, to explain mathematically, the “absolute value” of college; the majority of the positives of college are present at camp, and a majority of the inverses of the negatives of college are also present at camp.