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Counselor-in-Training at a Maine Camp – Why it Matters

Written for Maine Camp Experience

Maine Camp Experience camps have provided amazing growth experiences for youth for over 100 years through summer camp. For older teens, the fun doesn’t have to end after their camper years. Most camps offer a training program where leadership skills are emphasized and specific, marketable training is provided.

“Counselor in Training” or CIT/CT or LT (leadership training) are programs where teens ages 15-17, depending on the camp, learn from A – Z about being a camp counselor. Some camps offer Lifeguard Training, Junior Maine Guide program or sport-specific certifications like Archery Instructor Training or Certified Horsemanship Association levels. These marketable skills are great resume builders and. moreover, they are great confidence builders.

Self esteem increases through building skills in public speaking, working with a group of children, practicing teaching and getting feedback, planning and organizing special events, evening programs, organizing community service opportunities and making the difference in a child’s life.  Over and over again for a summer of life learning.

Check with your Maine Camp Experience camp to find out how their CIT program works. Is it open to the public or did you have to be a camper there before? Is there full tuition or a reduced cost for the program? Do CITs live as a group with a counselor or do they live in the bunks and meet with their director on a regular basis? What skills and certifications should you expect to get from the CIT program? Is it a full summer or can you attend part of the summer as a CIT? Is there an application process or can anyone attend?

What you will get if you become a CIT is life changing.   You gain a sense of yourself and what you want to do with your life, you grow into being a leader and experience responsibility in a new way.  Immersed in the camp experience you learn time-management skills, planning and organizational skills.  Being around positive adults you develop your own sense of responsibility, and learn from them. You feel a sense of accomplishment like never before – your confidence increases and your life skills develop.  You have a better chance of being hired at a camp after successfully completing the program, too.

The biggest value you get is what you learn about yourself as a team player in a group. The self reflection is priceless.  As one CIT said when I interviewed her “everyone should do it!”

Thanks to Camp Caribou, Camp Runoia and Camp Wyonegonic for contributing to this blog.

Camp is like a snapshot. The memories and the times that we had here will stick in our mind not as the continuous flow of activity that it was, but as the individual actions that make up the movements.  Images are the one thing that stick with us throughout time.  They are powerful tools that create emotion and linger longer than any words we could ever hope to say.  When we see the camp Runoia logo there are many emotions that come through.  There is joy at seeing camp, there is pride at being associated with it and there is annoyance at the memory of wearing uniforms. Images of girls running races, riding horses, climbing towers, all trigger memories of fine Maine days and warm summer nights.  When we think back on the summer and our times at camp what we will remember most will be the images created here, frozen pieces of time caught and preserved forever as if on film.

Throughout the summer we create projects to take home.  In wood burning, images are preserved evermore on pine or aspen, never fading.  In arts and crafts pieces are made with paint, string, or papier-mâché, taken home and enshrined eternally.  These images and these designs will continue to remind us of fun times and laughter years after camp is over.  Taking one look at the old, yet well preserved, artwork will overwhelm us with memories and flood us with the happiness and serenity that we associate with camp.

Not only do we cherish images associated with camp but we also cherish what camp does to our self-image and our confidence level.  At camp we grow as individuals and gain lifelong skills that we will use in the many years to come.  Once you go to camp your image of yourself is changed forever.  You discover things about yourself that you would never have known about.  You become sailors, riders, archers, climbers, artists and even wilderness guides.

Images hold so much for us than just their lines and strokes.  They hold emotion and memory that can only be brought out by looking at them.  Years from now when a person picks up this log and looks at the images enclosed within this book they will see themselves not only as the person they were at camp, but as the person they have become.    

That is why I hereby dedicate the log of 2014 to images.

-Isabel Snyder