Going to summer camp is more than just an unforgettable week away from home with your friends — it’s also an investment in your skills, character, and future. Summer camp teaches every camper a slew of critical life skills including organization, leadership, and time management.
Here are just a few of the ways campers learn to plan ahead while enjoying the fun and games at Camp Starlight!
Navigating camp activities
Practicing how to plan time for cleanup, getting around camp between activities, and bringing the things you need to complete each activity doesn’t just prepare campers for sports, crafts, and sailing — it prepares them for the hectic pace of life outside camp, from school all the way to college!
Days at summer camp tend to be packed with activities, from waking up at dawn to falling asleep at dusk, and being on time for each of your activities ensures that you will have enough time to have the maximum fun possible. Learning to balance so many activities in a busy day is certainly one of camp’s biggest challenges, but with a little bit of practice everyone gets the hang of it.
After a full camp schedule, your school schedule will probably feel easy. After all, getting from one class to the next isn’t nearly as difficult as making it all the way from the archery range to the arts and crafts center!
Planning Skits and Talent Shows
Most campers choose to participate in either a skit or a talent show at some point during their session. Usually, skits and talents are created and practiced during free time and rest periods. Campers have to find a time in their daily schedule to plan their skit, create props, and practice with other campers.
The incremental process of preparing performances helps campers build experience planning group projects and break down large, complex homework assignments into more manageable pieces, so they can complete a little each day.
Counselors love helping campers plan for skits, because it’s a chance to teach important life lessons about approaching a challenge. The secret to camp performances is taking one small step at a time.
Completing a Cookout
Cooking out over a campfire involves quite a bit of planning. Not only do you have to decide on a meal and order your ingredients from the kitchen ahead of time, but you have to divide cooking tasks such as food prep and fire tending between your group and make sure you start early enough for your meal to be served on schedule. Being a cook is hard! (But super rewarding, especially over a traditional open fire.)
Your cookout experience will teach you to value the importance of planning your projects in detail before you start them. While most of your school projects will not end with a tasty, fire-cooked meal, the feeling of accomplishment after detailed planning will no doubt remind you of your camp experiences.
Looking to the future
Camp is filled with experiences that teach campers to plan ahead. From keeping your bunk clean (for the sake of your roomies!) to completing challenges in a ropes course, you will have plenty of opportunities to create plans and see the results of your effort.
While not everything may work out the first time — it’s not a big deal to be late to an activity or burn your dinner once in a while — you will eventually learn what type of planning works for you, and be able to apply your experiences to the rest of your life. Campers love to live in the moment, but they always have one eye on the future. With a little bit of planning, every second of camp is a blast!
If you were to ask the adults in my life to describe me in one word, they would probably say “focused” or “disciplined” or “passionate.” This would be their nice way of saying I focus on one thing and one thing only, my grades. Now of course this makes my parents really happy, and they are proud of all of the A’s I bring home on my report card, and are excited about all of the opportunities I’ll have after high school. But they also realized that something was a little off balance. The time and energy and stress that I put on myself and my rising GPA left little room to enjoy other things typical teenagers should be enjoying, like art, sports and friends and a book other than a textbook. But when I leave for camp every summer and say goodbye to my calculators and textbooks I try to some balance.
Written by Megan Panelas 
It’s hard to imagine Camp Starlight without the waterfront. Nothing embodies the camp experience quite like a crystal-clear day out on the water, paddling with your friends and exploring the open water.
As told through the eyes of someone who is glad to know…
The first moment that I stepped off the bus in Starlight, Pennsylvania I got a feeling that I never would have had anywhere else. That feeling is now something that makes up a piece of my heart.
“It’s just a camp thing.” If you’ve ever been a summer camper or camp counselor, chances are it’s a phrase you know well. I mean, how else can you explain all the wacky traditions at summer camp?
Just because it’s far away from school doesn’t mean learning stops when you’re at summer camp. From team sports that build your communication abilities to craft workshops that get you in touch with your inner artist, camp activities are carefully designed to always be teaching you an important life skill.
Searching for internships can be stressful. Not only are you competing with every college student in the country, but also you’re competing against yourself. College age kids, more affectionately referred to as “millennials” are looking for internships that not only make their resume better than their classmates, but also lets them make a difference as opposed to making copies. For some, making copies at a high end accounting firm, or fetching coffee at multi-million dollar tech company is fine, as long as they can put it on their resume and fake it in their next interview about what they truly did all summer. But for others, the ability to take ownership of a project, to look back on a summer and say, “I can’t believe I did that!”, is more important than working for a fortune 500 company.
Believe me, I was skeptical. but the beauty of interning at camp is that I got to make my own experience. When I was interviewing I let them know that I was looking for college credit and some sort of administration experience, being a business major. I was offered a role as part-time counselor, part-time programming assistant. The title itself did not express what I was doing all summer by any means. My time in the office allowed me to see the business side of camping and the industry as a whole. It opened my eyes to what it truly takes to run a top-tier summer camp. If there was a job to be done at camp I did it. Data entries, inventory, making sure program areas had supplies and were able to run efficiently. Heck I even fixed a few doors and put tables together.
500 kids, all at once, and at that moment, camp became real to me. Apart from my responsibilities in the office I now had 10 kids that I had to take care of for 7 weeks. This is the part of my internship where I could really make a difference. Essentially, I was a parent for the summer, and that really intimidated me. I was still in school; I just got used to taking care of myself and now I need to care for a group of 9-year-old boys. But I quickly learned that although they were young, they were smart, self-sufficient, and ended up teaching me more than I could ever teach them.
It was fantastic to see one of Camp Starlight’s campers, Sam Seltzer, host “Stack The Caps” at his school!