The sun is shining and everyone packs their cars up for magical vacations or adventurous day trips. Yet here you are working for minimum wage watching all of your friends having fun. But at what cost?

The ability to have spending money is what motivates you to work over your vacation. Without this job, you either would not be able to afford any type of living or would depend on your parents to fully support you. Like myself, you know that the latter is unacceptable. A summer vacation in Italy that you did not contribute a penny for is something that just cannot be acceptable.

If you are anything like me, you have held some sort of summer job since the summer before high school. Your friends would do all of these amazing things during break and you would enviously wish that you magically won the lottery so you could quit and go on adventures as well. Instead of traveling to some amazing trail a few hours away or spending a few days at some fancy beach, you were working hard to earn money.Your friends were lucky enough that their parents would pay for everything they wanted to do or that their significant other would stipend the costs. Yes, while your parents do help pay for some of the things you want to do, they also require that you work.

Working during the summer is actually beneficial to our futures though. The primary reason that this is so beneficial is that when we get a legitimate career after college ends, we will know what it is like to spend the whole year occupied and not have a long vacation. If you have a full-time summer job, you will be able to handle a career that provides only a few vacation days annually.

Having a summer job also reaffirms the idea that money does not just appear out of nowhere. When you have hard-earned cash, it is much more difficult to spend because you realize that $40 on a meal is half a day's pay. That $1,000 plane ticket to Europe is two weeks worth of effort and you can barely afford the rest of that trip. Instead of being that child who gets a free trip that mommy and daddy paid for (which teaches them nothing about actually earning money), you can pay for your college tuition or groceries. Without a job, we forget that $150 for a pair of shoes is actually a lot of money.

Probably the most important thing about a summer job is that you are showing your future boss that you had the dedication to have experience in the future. You gave up your summer for little to no pay, horrible hours, stressful work, and new knowledge. Honey, you are a go-getter. Adding a summer job to your resume, especially one that you have held for multiple summers or that continues into the school year, shows an employer how serious you truly are.

So congratulations, my fellow hard-working summer employees. Yes, we will miss out on some fun adventures, but we will get over it. Instead of having our parents pay for a vacation that we did not earn, we are earning our futures. From the interns who earn no money, to those camp counselors dealing with outrageous children, you did not give up your summer--you prioritized it.