Time to Get a Real Job (Reprise)
“Josh, isn’t it time you got a real job?”
A few years ago, I wrote about my siblings’ reaction when I told them that I would be returning to work at sleepaway camp for yet another summer. In their eyes, it would have been prudent for an incoming college sophomore to get experience in an office or lab instead of playing basketball and planning color war.
In my eyes, though, there is no job that is more real than working at a summer camp. My time as a camp counselor taught me invaluable skills — creativity, responsibility, and professionalism to name a few —- that are helpful in all sorts of scenarios.
A few years later, I am recovering from chronic lack of sleep after completing my third summer as a division head. In between my naps on the couch and responding to the hundreds of unread Whatsapp messages on my phone, I reflected on some of the incredible benefits I received from working in this position.
Although every division head has a different approach, I seek to run a “tight ship.” If there are programs that are supposed to happen – soccer, arts and crafts, davening, or night activities – they must happen, and they must happen well. This means that campers are attending these events rather than ditching them, counselors are present and continually finding ways to improve the activity, and division heads are involved in the details that keep everyone engaged.
Take, for instance, Slow Shira – the singing of songs in between Seudah Shlishit and the end of Shabbat. While the event can be meaningful and deeply moving, this objective can only be reached if every type of participant fulfills his role. The campers must internalize that this event is not optional and that everyone is expected to attend. If only 35 out of 135 campers attend Slow Shira, it will reinforce the notion that the “cool” thing to do is to ditch activities, when in reality all the “cool” things in life come from buying into things, not escaping them. The counselors – after ensuring all the campers are out of the bunks and at the location of Slow Shira – should avoid standing on the outskirts and instead get involved, sitting amidst the campers to motivate them to learn new tunes and sing with some emotion. The division head, charged with running the event from behind the scenes, must be sensitive to the details that many might never notice. Starting the singing before most people arrive might seem counterintuitive, but it allows people right outside to hear something drawing them in and for those who arrive to feel like they have come to something already alive and happening. Although most people simply sit down and start singing, they don’t realize that the division head is simultaneously leading the singing for the campers, gesturing to his counselors to sit with the campers, and communicating to his co-division head to bring more campers into the room, all while he keeps an eye on the clock to make sure that a story is told at the perfect moment. In short, if Slow Shira is to be successful, all groups have to be firing on all cylinders, and it is up to the division head to facilitate that.
In addition to ensuring that events run well, the division head must be creative. A few years ago, I wrote about how the counselor is creative, whether it be through planning night activities, making inside jokes with their bunks, or finding ways to fill dead time with something fun. However, if a counselor’s creativity is centered around designing engaging opportunities, the division head’s creativity is about facilitating the counselors’ creative ideas. While I would have certainly loved to be the one writing the lyrics to the color war song or planning a night activity, I understood that my role had shifted when I became a division head: I now had to help actualize the vision of my counselors.
Night activities are a good example. Bringing my wealth of experience to the table, I would ask the bigger questions, listen to the plans of my counselors, and help them tinker with the design of the event to ensure that it succeeds. I might agree with my counselors that a game show would be a nice idea, but I would challenge them to make it different from the trivia night the campers enjoyed two weeks prior.
Aside from helping create the broad vision for the night activity, though, I would also ask the smaller questions. Indeed, a game show would be fun, but how could we ensure maximal engagement? Would it be more effective to randomize groups of people or separate them by bunk? Will the questions be read off of a screen, or will they be presented on a slideshow? What are ways we can ensure that people who are eliminated or waiting for the next round start are engaged and remain at the venue? While the counselor is initially primarily concerned with the broader creative ideas, through asking the right questions, the division head is there to ensure that the counselor’s creativity can be brought to fruition and reaches its full potential. Still creativity, just in a different type of way.
Yet these takeaways only scratch the surface of how I have grown through my work as a division head. Everything mentioned so far relates to skills such as running programming efficiently, keeping participants engaged, and maintaining focus on crucial details. But camp teaches much more than practical workplace skills; it teaches life skills.
Through working at camp as a division head, I have become much better with people and a more open-minded person. While there are many ways that these themes manifest themselves, they are most prominently seen in how I strived to give feedback to my counselors and take what everyone had to say seriously.
One realm that the division head is tasked with is professional feedback. Similar to what might be found in other workplaces, in order for the division’s counselors to enjoy their jobs and perform to the best of their abilities, the division head – their direct superior – must provide both positive reinforcement and constructive criticism.
Needless to say that running activities, trips, meals and prayers for over a hundred twenty campers while also overseeing over twenty counselors from eight in the morning until midnight on very little sleep can be quite a stressful and exhausting experience. Finding moments where our counselors do something right can be extremely difficult when any minor slip up makes you feel like the entire enterprise is crumbling. Nevertheless, over the past few years, I was challenged in these moments to find moments of my counselors doing the right thing, and more importantly, to let them know that I saw them doing it.
The effects of positive feedback are threefold. First, it allows the counselors to feel appreciated for their hard work and guides them to act similarly in the future. Second, it creates mutual feelings of goodwill between the division head and his counselor: People have a greater affection for those who compliment them and value their hard work. Third, as a boss, instead of constantly filing grievances about your workers and complaining about what is not working, seeking to give positive feedback forces you to see the bright moments in the day and in people.
More difficult than giving positive feedback, though, is providing constructive criticism. On the one hand, counselors who are struggling or neglectful in certain respects must be informed and redirected toward the correct path. On the other hand, an impulsive or abrasive comment can insult a counselor, cripple his self-esteem, and prevent him from internalizing the core message of the feedback. Crafting effective constructive criticism thus becomes an art – an act of balancing: redirecting behavior while maintaining the relationship.
This was by far the hardest part of my job, and I certainly failed at least several times. Counselors sometimes felt underappreciated and attacked, obstructing them from heeding to my points of feedback. Over time, though, I became pretty solid at managing the tension. Through careful diction, proper tone, and positive reinforcement, I was able to guide my counselors on the better path while simultaneously maintaining good relationships with them.
Such a skill transcends the boss-employee relationship. When tasked with confronting a roommate about an apartment issue or a loved one about a family dynamic, I now strive to be more mindful not just of what I say but how I say it.
Perhaps the greatest skill I learned throughout my time at camp was to treat every person like an adult – someone whose words matter. When a camper is suspected of picking a fight with another camper, his absolute guilt is not immediately assumed nor is a punishment predetermined; rather, his side of the story is heard and internalized before any decision is made. Instead of feeling attacked and responding defensively, the campers viewed me as a figure who was there to help them out.
I would similarly strive to seriously listen to counselors. When dealing with disciplinary situations or scheduling issues, I asked the counselors what they thought we should do. When complaints about how counselors were being treated by the administration or a lack of transparency in certain decision making processes were brought forward, I listened carefully to the staff members, advocated for them, and followed up as to the status of their requests. While it is easy to see the frustration of counselors as emanating from a sort of disgruntled-employee sentiment and ignore their requests, such a response would not be taking them – adults with valuable points to contribute – seriously.
Such an approach is sometimes counterintuitive to a position of authority. In such roles, our initial reaction is often no, and we jump to make executive decisions without hearing the suggestions of others. Any request from a camper is not possible, and ideas brought up by a staff member are too different from the current structure to be implemented. But in the same way that I want to feel heard, empowered, and validated by my bosses at camp, the campers and especially the counselors feel the same way.
Albeit in a bit of a different context, this tendency to say no in positions of authority reminds me of a quote from Schindler’s List: “True power is when you have every right to kill but choose to pardon instead.” There is something extremely liberating about saying yes and being merciful or open-minded in an instance where it is so easy to say no, be stringent and abstain from considering other possibilities. In camp, I learned how valuable it was – for both me and whomever I was speaking to – to initially answer yes and only say no if there are good reasons for doing so.
These experiences broadened the scope of where I thought valuable ideas can come from. Instead of bolstering my ego and being overly selective as to who I pay attention to, camp has pushed me to be more open-minded to the suggestions of younger siblings, friends who have taken different life paths, and people less experienced than me in certain areas.
Sitting in camp on the final night of my twelfth and perhaps final year, I spoke to a close friend that I made when I first became a staff member in 2019. We spoke about the different ways that camp has profoundly impacted us over the last six years. Most importantly, I noted that I made some of my closest friends in camp.
When asked, though, what I was feeling on that final night, all that came to mind was gratitude. Absolute and immense gratitude.
Other people simply do not benefit from these opportunities at my age. Many of my friends stopped coming to camp four summers ago to get internships and work in labs, experiences akin to the “real” jobs of the world. For me, though, specifically these last few summers have been some of the most impactful periods of personal growth in my life and have taught me some of the most lasting skills I could ask for.
Not bad for a job that isn’t real.
