While you may be dreaming of sleeping beyond eight A.M. or drinking Piña Coladas on Mediterranean sands, your bank funds are depleted, and you need a job. At this time, it is summer, and you have to return to college in three-four months, so it is not quite the time to start getting fancy with your resume. What you need is a seasonal job, a job where you can linger for some cash and then hit the road when the leaves start falling.
Here are some positions you may consider:
1. Ice Cream Scooper
This is a job that takes very little skill. It is comparative to doodling in the margins while in class, but instead of earning credits, you are earning money. Let your brain take a breather for some months, scoop mindlessly, or maybe chat and joke with customers. You can decide how present you would like to be. As long as you’re still scooping, you’re golden. The cherry on top: Ice cream!
2. Nanny
In the summer, families go on vacation. For parents, a vacation is not quite a vacation with children in tow. That is why parents hire a nanny, someone to take care of their children while they drink and pose obscenely with foreign toilets. That’s where you come in. Nannies get paid to go on vacation. Granted, the nanny will probably have a kid, or two, or three on his or her hip, but at the sight of the Eiffel Tower, a person is more inclined to iterate “Oh là là” than “Get off me!
3. Online Seller
Nothing reveals how much stuff you don’t use anymore quite like returning home for the summer. Be your own boss and eradicate clutter as you earn cash. Empty your closet, dressers, and bookshelves of anything you no longer use and sell on sites like Etsy, Craigslist, Amazon, and Ebay. This is also an optimum time to resell last semester’s textbooks that will never be worth as much as you paid for them.
4. Life Guard
Like ice cream scooping, this is a cliché summer job, but there is a reason it’s a cliché. Being a lifeguard (as long as you can swim and have a good attention span) is akin to being a superhero. You get to sit on your lifeguard throne, like Spiderman hanging on the Empire State building, while you survey the city-ahem pool-for people in trouble. When you return to school and peers talk about how they played with polar bears in Antarctica, you can relate how you saved lives.
5. Family Servant
While conventional jobs come with official paychecks, doing chores for family members is a good way to earn untaxed cash and help out loved ones in need. Wash Pop’s car, mow the lawn for Uncle Jim, or babysit your cousin Lillian. All for set amounts of money, of course. Before you do the task at hand, make sure you negotiate a price or get paid upfront so you don’t get swindled. Blood may be thicker than water, but sometimes it runs pretty thin.
In between sweating for the green, make sure you schedule time for fun and friends. Money may make the world go round, but what is the worth of a life unlived?
