Take advantage of summer's opportunities

Summer break scrubs clean the grubby hands of a long semester and a foul finals week.

After months spent chugging Rockstar energy drinks and sleeping less than a resident physician with night tremors, we put down pencils and put on sunscreen.

Backyards transform into fine dining rooms for barbecues and the sound of waves hitting the beach acts as a mating call for hot bodies.

For some, summer still means working on tan lines, but with economic situations increasingly inducing more heatstrokes, many students choose to sweat behind an office desk rather than in the sun.

In high school, people signed yearbooks with friendly invocations to laidback vacations. Now ambitious classmates and peers feel bad for "just" taking summer classes and working part time. It seems that later in our scholastic careers the real world thunderstorms our once cloudless summer breaks.

College semesters filled with classes, work schedules, practices and meetings do not allow the ambitious student much time to gain hands-on experience outside of the classroom. Ideally, a summer break permits time to accomplish things that semester schedules prohibit.

But for many, summer acts as an extension of the school year – the only difference is in the weather.

During the summer months, many college students trade board shorts and bikinis for boardrooms and blouses by taking an internship or working more hours at a current job.

Each year, more and more of my college friends decide to spend their sunny break chugging coffee in office cubicles rather than sipping margaritas by the pool.

Carefree, running-through-sprinklers-on-a-hot-day summers are quickly becoming a thing of the past.

In grade school, gangly kids with braces and bad skin go to camps to improve a jump shot or their tuba-playing skills.

As adulthood approaches, summer is more often used to improve résumés and networking relationships (summer camp for adults).  The grown-up arts and crafts of PowerPoint and Excel spreadsheets replace the popcorn strings and macaroni portraits of youth.

Summer becomes another bulleted point of experience on a resume. We go from crunching abs to crunching numbers.

Backpacks to briefcases, internships and relevant work history serve as an important part of the college experience.

Employers want to hire college graduates prepared enough to immediately start contributing to their company. Graduates who know how to us the copy machine for more than just copying bare butt cheeks move up the recruiting list.

While college summers may not always look like the lazy days some of us remember from youth, we still need to write a memo reminding ourselves that summer still means possibility.

As an educated workforce, responsibility lies in increasing our productivity.

A college degree correlates with the culmination of the effort and experience put into obtaining it. Graduating with straight A's is great, but without practical application a 4.0 looks like an HTML specification.

In the workforce, a degree may not prove enough to meet job requirements. It seems job listings want graduates to have years of work-related training coming out of college. While extensive career development proves difficult in busy college lives, summer gives students the opportunity to earn some experience and pocket change.

Summer is (for some) a time of no more schoolbooks or professors' dirty looks; waking up around 2 p.m. and spending the rest of the day surfing. For others, the break allows a sandaled foot to get into the door of corporate America.

Either way, we have to lick the ice cream of summer before it drips down the side of the cone; after our college summers melt away, the sticky hands of adulthood are what we have left.