For my fellow Aggies who have realized that their summer may not include that dreamy internship and now look back to their minimum-wage jobs to fill their time and pockets, congrats! This is sure to be a properly wonderful summer, despite what corporate America tries to tell you.

For as long as I could remember, summer was the best season. There was no school, so there were no worries, only chalk drawings covered in sticky popsicle syrup and screams of glee as we ran wild through the neighborhood streets. Then, in my teenage years, I was finally able to fulfill my childhood dream and become the girl selling the syrup at the snow cone stand in between my lake plunges and hours of scorching my skin off for a golden glow. 

Now in college, people are consumed by the idea that the quickest, easiest, absolute best path to success is a lovely little — and hopefully paid — internship. And if it’s not at your family company — happy days — you’ve really made it as the most accomplished person by securing one of the 10 possible internships available across the country.

Supposedly, clocking in and mindlessly clicking on a computer screen to seem busy — or worse, actually editing an Excel sheet — in a dark room lit by fluorescent lights is the key to a perfect summer as a 21-year-old. This will not only ensure happiness forever, but will also definitely be your happiest memories of college. 

Skipping out on the UV is all the rage to protect against wrinkles anyway.

There’s this push that before you even have your college degree, an internship may be the sole way to secure a job post-graduation. And sure, it helps a lot of people, but your finite summers are coming to an end. If “Closing Time” hasn’t begun to play in your head because it’s not quite your final semester yet, it should be anyway because even during freshman year, you’re only looking at a guaranteed three summers left. 

So, if your plans this summer happen to include a minimum wage job or a questionably low summer camp counselor weekly salary, you might actually be on track for some beautiful memories of youth that your classmates will be missing out on. 

I hate to say it, but you should already be nostalgic for the future because not a summer break, nor a classic summer job, is in the cards forever. 

Ice cream shops take on more summer staff, summer camps beg for people a little more qualified than the local high schoolers to lead the kids’ outdoor adventures and the cities are begging for lifeguards to keep the neighborhood pools open. 

I concede, you gain more than just fun memories from these jobs. Your coworkers range from the 14-year-old middle school graduates to middle-aged moms of three, and yet everyone becomes a little family for those few weeks of summer, knowing that so many people are just passing through during the summer rush. 

These jobs demand you be socially adept in a time where people are asked to enter the workforce post-graduation without ever having dealt with a child having a meltdown over a dropped soft-serve cone. Since that’s what a summer job is really all about: learning that you might want to hold off on having kids for a couple of years.

So, if you’re currently in the process of reevaluating your plans for the summer, I encourage you to look for ones based in the Bryan-College Station community or your hometown. Specifically, ones where they ask if you can stand the Texas heat because you’ll be outside for eight hours a day taking the orders of drunken bachelorette parties or screaming at kids to stop running across the wet concrete. 

It’s there that you’re an active participant in the splendid concept of “community” that people have slowly neglected over the years in exchange for bettering their own individual lives.

Texas summers are not forgotten just because you are a university student. Why live in Texas, a state alive with communities that watch after their neighbors under the grand sky, if you are so hell-bent on leaving it all behind so quickly for the isolation desks we die at?

These three months of summer do not determine your entire future. Your employer will not see a summer camp counselor on your resume and wish you were the part-time, unpaid social media intern of an unknown company instead. In fact, in the hopeful eyes of me, a junior in college , maybe the person hiring you will be reminded of their own days at Camp fill-in-the-blank-here, which they will swear wasn’t a cult. 

Why be in such a hurry to leave the summer behind? 

Business casual Fridays are a tradition that can wait. Jean shorts and tie-dyed shirts are still an acceptable uniform for anyone, especially in your university summers where you’re still young enough to know what fun is. 

Thea Findlay is a communication junior and opinion writer for The Battalion.