I started at Awosting as a camper. I slept away there every summer from 9-16 years old. During this time, I grew to know the camp like the back of my hand. I knew everyone and how everything operated, or so I thought. At 17, I became a counselor in training. It was then that I realized that I had not seen all the work and planning that had gone into making my years there operate so smoothly. I spent those next two summers training to be a counselor. I began to understand how best to provide value so that I could contribute to the experience I had grown up with.
Let me say that nothing teaches you how to be quick on your feet like taking care of children. Anything can happen at the drop of a hat, often many things.You have to react quickly, be patient, and make everyone happy while still following the rules. For example, one night I came back from my day off to find 6 of the 8 kids in my cabin were crying, for various reasons. I bounced between the kids, find out what was bothering them, and somehow solved the problem (within the confines of the rules) without giving unbalanced attention to any one kid. What inspired this approach was my memory of how amazing my counselors were when I was a kid. Having the experience of the other side of things as a younger boy was one of the things that really helped me to become an effective counselor. This taught me the importance of understanding what is wanted and needed by the client/customer from their side
Other responsibilities I had include working on a team that managed the ropes course, helping run arts and craft electives, and assisting with the management and creation of evening activities. In order to manage all of this, my responsibilities were carefully organized into time slots, so each could be handled in its own time with maximum attention and care. I learned the massive importance of organization and time management when confronted with a large number of equally important responsibilities. Another truly important thing I learned was to do everything with passion. When you work with kids, you can clearly see the impact of everything you do, especially your attitude. Kids are perceptive, and they watch you closely. When you work with passion and a good attitude, you inspire those around you to have passion and love as well. Just because the results are clearer in children does not mean that the same is not true for adults. It is honestly the best feeling in the world to inspire someone, on any level. The evening activities were always my favorite part of camp, and I have always loved planning events and games. These evening activities were events or games that involved the entire camp, which is around 200 people, and ran for about 2-3 hours every night. Some activities would have a two to three day theatrical build up that made the event even more exciting.
I offered to help manage them, and tried to help wherever I could. At first, I was making props and decorations, costumes and game accessories. Then, I became the assistant to my supervisor in charge of evening activities. Eventually, after learning all the details that went into planning and running these activities, I asked to design, write, and operate one of my own. When I was given this opportunity I was over the moon.
I decided that I wanted to create a game called revolution, in which one of the most well loved admins of the camp pretended to become a tyrannical leader, and we as a camp needed to throw a revolution. I learned so much from this experience, as I needed to manage people creating props, storyline, game mechanics, and around 160 children. I learned how important it is to understand the smaller parts of something, and how they move before I could effectively manage the whole. I also learned that when something goes wrong in the moment with 160 children, or with any audience, you just have to adapt and improvise to your absolute best.
(This post was originally written for a post on Linkedin)
