| Every summer I spend a week volunteering at a summer camp for kids. The camp is structured to be extremly low cost, so they hire a minimal skeleton staff for the summer and rely on volunteers to run each week. I started when I was 16 and have gone every summer. I credit my volunteering with nearly every one of my soft skills since it's a lot of work to entertain 85 11-13 year olds for a week. I'm very good at presenting because I have spent years public speaking to particularly hard audiences. If you don't captivate an audience of 13 year olds they will let you know. I am much more patient and flexible from years spent working with kids. I'm a pretty introverted guy and don't usually want to be front and center, but I have developed a whole camp persona I can slip into anytime I need to command a room. Sometimes it rains and you need to spend a few hours inside. Sometimes an activity you think was going to be really fun just doesn't work. No point in getting frustrated about the weather or an idea that didn't pan out, just change to the next idea and keep the fun going. 11-13 year olds can be extremly cruel to one another and these kids haven't learned to control their emotions and responses yet. Calm, patient listening goes so much further than just trying to fix whatever problem they are bringing to you. My time at camp has been hugely rewarding and I'm certain I wouldn't have gotten my current job without the skills I learned there. To my dying day the best idea I will ever have is plunger olympics, which is tons of olympic events performed with toilet plungers. There is plunger toss, plunger lacross, and plunger luge where you lay on a skateboard and pull yourself along with plungers to name a few. The crowning events are synchronized plunging and the plunger regatta in the pool. The kid who wins each event keeps a plunger as the prize and we open and close with lighting the campfire with a burning plunger. |