Summertime in Boulder is a time for the student body to spend hot days cooling off at the Boulder Creek, afternoons drinking on rooftop bars and cool nights camping in Rocky Mountain National Park.
Camping in the summer is different from camping in the winter. One of the reasons this is so, is that bears don’t hibernate in the summer, meaning that there is a constant looming danger of a bear attack.
But camping is only for the ones rugged enough to be willing to do it, and the creek and rooftop bars are only available to the portion of students that decide to stay in Boulder over the summer. However, much of the student body does not remain in Boulder. Some decide to use their summer to travel to exotic locations.
Tim West-Heiss, a 21-year-old psychology and sociology major, said he used his summer to travel.
“I Went to Africa on a safari, with my mom,” West-Heiss said at Baseline Liquor. West-Heiss said that he visited Egypt, Kenya and Tanzania on his journey.
Summer 2010 was filled with news about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In a time when the environmentalists held their breaths about sea life in the Gulf, West-Heiss observed what he could only refer to as, “a ton of animals.”
While fishermen were worried about the upcoming shrimp harvest in Louisiana, others where learning other things.
Jordan Wilkie, a 20-year-old ecology and evolutionary biology major, spent half of his summer in Boulder and the other half traveling to Georgia. When asked about what he did on his summer break, Wilkie was quick to respond.
“I went on a vacation to Atlanta, Georgia,” Wilkie said. “I proceeded to visit the University of Georgia in Athens, where I then met former Miss Teen North Carolina and proceeded to have sexual relations with her.”
Exotic friends and locations were not on the minds of all the students of CU. There was another group of students who had more serious things in mind. As the years of college pass by the real world starts to approach with greater speed and clarity, prompting some students to spend their summers working at unpaid internships in order to build up a resume. Amid the economic crisis and the frightening levels of unemployment, there were rumors of people who wanted to question the legality of unpaid labor in the form of unpaid internships.
This may have been because of people working in unpaid positions who were doing so in order to qualify themselves for a real job. Students, however, are more than willing to take the unpaid spots in order to make themselves just a little more appealing when it comes time to start applying for jobs after graduation.
Andrew Tomasini, a 22-year-old broadcast news major, spent his summer working for the Cape Cod Baseball League.
“I did the play-by-play and colored commentary on 52 games for the Bourne Braves,” Tomasini said.
This required Tomasini to show up ready to do commentary, “From roughly two to ten basically everyday,” Tomasini said.
Baseball commentary was something Tomasini explained he looked forward to doing over his summer break, but it was no cakewalk.
“Sometimes there where two games in a day, which was a lot of prep work” Tomasini said.
Regardless of whether the summer break was spent exploring the far corners of the Dark Continent or at an internship in Cape Cod, it is safe to say that even though school wasn’t in session, it doesn’t mean students stopped learning. For the students that spent their summer months in summer school, they learned too, but in an objectively not-as-cool way.
Some people, like Jordan Wilkie, may not have learned as much as others, but what he may have lacked in education he made up for with an experience that he will soon not forget. But summer is gone, and now it is time to get back to the books… in a week or two.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Seth Gitner at Seth.gitner@colorado.edu.
