Featured Blog: High School Underground: Scrambling for Summer Jobs

Summer has had me in its clutches far too long and so I’ve naturally (naturally, being a teen in summertime) been neglecting my duties to the Patch.

It’s not as though I don’t enjoy writing for the Patch. I do. I love it. But it seems to me that no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to sit myself down in front of this keyboard and write.

Maybe it’s the lazy call of summer, which lures me back into its productive-stifling lotus land, but that’s really no excuse. To make me feel even worse, while I try and sit myself down in front of this computer, a majority of the other students at my fair high school are making me look bad as they’re hard at work, either at their summer jobs or trying to find one.

Summer jobs are getting harder and harder to come by. With the economy like it is, high school students aren’t the only ones job hunting and frantically assembling their resumes.

We now have to compete with adults who have actual job experience, ones that have resumes that say more than the typical “babysitting” “teamwork skills” “efficiency” and “people skills” that are stretched to fill up the page of students’ resumes.

What’s worse than the fact that we have to compete with these adults is that it isn’t even a real competition. What chance do we, just inexperienced 15- and 16-year-olds, stand if there are adults who have worked for 30 or more years applying for the same job? More importantly, how can we get something impressive on our resumes if every job is denied us because of a more experienced person?

It’s not totally unreasonable to me that an employer would choose the more experienced person for the job. What I find unfair about it is how easily kids my age are tossed aside because of assumptions.

Just because we’re young does not make us irresponsible or immature, and just because we don’t have as much experience does not make it any harder for us than the older applicants to learn what the job requires. If those reasons don’t do it for the employers, then the fact that students in high school are willing to work for minimum wage should.

There is one safe haven for students out on the prowl for jobs: the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. I think it's awesome how many students the Boardwalk hires every summer, and quite frankly, I don’t understand why other businesses don’t see what an opportunity they have before them to hire hard workers for the lowest price (I know, that sounds a lot like slave labor).

We high school students in Santa Cruz see it as an inevitability to work at the Boardwalk, since all the other jobs are so hard to come by. While the opportunity that the Boardwalk presents is amazing, there is something incredibly eerie about walking down that main strip and seeing the bored faces of kids you know in every shop. It’s like some low-budget horror movie, something along the lines of Brainwash Boardwalk.

Well, better to be bored and paid than bored and poor.