From Camp Counselor To Career Connection

Who would guess that I, a non-Christian girl who does not love kids, would choose to be a camp counselor at a YMCA camp? Yet I fell in love with a place that, on paper, does not match who I am at all. It is Christian, I am not. It is focused on children, I do not want to have any. It requires you to be an extrovert, yet I am an introvert. It is full of southern belles and I am a failed debutant. There is no reason for me to be in love with this mountaintop, yet I have had my most formative moments there. I would even go so far to say that it has lead me to what I want to do with my life. Somehow, in my bent mind, I connected my work with 14-year-old girls to Business Psychology.

I have spent the last three summers in a cabin with terrified teenage girls going into high school, just dying for someone to offer up some advice. Some of my best moments with them was my one-on-one talks with the campers hurting the most. Last year, sitting on the cabin porch late at night, a young girl poured her heart out to me, breaking mine more and more with every word. After she left me the next Friday, I did not hear from her for months. That was until I got a letter from her in the mail. She had an assignment to write a letter to someone who had made a difference in their life; she had chosen me. I was bursting with joy as I read her words, describing how having a young person care about her and give her honest advice had made her transition into high school easier.

That is just one of the many positive moments I have had at camp. That is not to say there were not bad moments. The bad moments might be even more important than the good because I grew and learned from them more than the positive moments. The problem solving, the little white lies, and the determination for someone else’s happiness are all tools I used to make it through those hard situations. I would like to believe that all of those aspects of what I learned will reflect in Business Psychology.

Please do not ask me how I jumped from camp counselor to Business Psychologist, because I am not quite sure if there is any direct correlation. But there are plenty of indirect correlations. Such as helping others, making people realize their potential, giving advice to someone who is extremely in need of it, yet is too proud to ask. I have had experience with all of these things at camp and to my knowledge one experiences all of these things in Business Psychology.

Juddy Arnold, a Business Psychologist at Insight Profiling, once said to me, “You have to struggle in order to help others who are struggling”. To me, this is the perfect way of helping others; there is no way to help someone without knowing their problems. Being a camp counselor and Business Psychologist, both have that advantage of helping others with problems you may have faced before. With that being said, I cannot just jump into giving people advice after graduation. No one would trust a 23-year-old, I would not trust a 23-year-old. So, before I jump into Business Psychology I would love to work with Prison Reform and helping young inmates. I guess I have a need to help people realize their potential; whether that be a young lady wanting advice on how to handle high school, a business that has no clear dream, or someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

You have to look for the hidden messages in life. At camp, most of the counselors want to be teachers. That makes sense for a camp counselor to become a teacher. Yet I went and found the aspects and qualities I love about camp instead of what it is on the outside. My favorite part about the job is seeing the campers grow and realize their potential, year after year. I can do that same thing in Business Psychology and I find that extraordinary. In order to realize my own potential, I had to help others realize theirs.