When Summer Plans Don't Go as Planned: The Value of an Unexpected Detour

When you've spent months researching, applying to, and planning summer programs, it's natural to want everything to work out as expected. Students arrive with expectations about what they'll learn and what the experience will be like.

But what happens when the plan changes? Maybe a student doesn't get into a first-choice program. A course gets canceled. Or the experience simply turns out to be different from what everyone expected.

When summer plans change, the best response is often to focus less on recreating the original plan and more on what other opportunities the change might create. A canceled course, rejection, or unexpected experience can give students a chance to explore something different, and sometimes discover an interest they wouldn't have pursued otherwise.

That's what happened to our son a few years ago. He had signed up for two back-to-back sessions of a pre-college summer program, both focused on computer science, a subject he had been passionate about since before middle school.

During the first week, we learned that his course for the second session had been cancelled because of an emergency involving the professor. After carefully planning the summer and weighing the pros and cons of various CS programs, suddenly the plan was gone. And, of course, his second- and third-choice programs were either full or already underway.

What to do?

By then, he had made good friends at the program and wanted to stay for the second session. Some of those friends were taking an economics course and had great things to say about it. So, somewhat unexpectedly, he decided to spend the second session diving into economics.

It turned into the most important discovery of his summer. He loved economics, threw himself into the coursework, and received encouraging feedback from the professor about his analysis. By the end of the session, he had decided he wanted to study economics in college. A few years later, as a college student, economics remained his primary academic focus.

We certainly wouldn't recommend having a carefully planned summer program cancelled, and there's no guarantee that an unexpected change will produce an equally happy outcome. But the experience did change how we think about summer planning. Sometimes a setback creates room for an experience a student never would have chosen otherwise, and that experience can turn out to be just as valuable, or even more so, than the original plan.

Plan carefully, but leave a little room for the unexpected. Sometimes the detour becomes the most memorable part of the summer.