Leaving aside the fact that career advice from the Bullblog is inherently suspect (we’re mostly unemployable and we enjoy watching others fail) here are some things to keep in mind if you want to avoid working as a camp counselor this summer.

DON’T

–Take an unpaid internship you’re not going to enjoy/learn from. You’ll make yourself miserable.

–Rely on UCS. They may be great at setting up interviews with consulting firms, but if you go to them looking for an internship they’ll inevitably end up suggesting that you “check out the website.”

–Overload your résumé. You probably learned this in high school, but it bears repeating: no one wants to know about your second place finish in your middle school’s “highly competitive” Science Fair. List your most essential/impressive experiences and accomplishments, and try to keep it all on one page.

–Attempt humor. A recent Bullblog post quoted English prof John Rogers’ spot-on observation that Yale is “saturated in an ironic mode that your parents can’t understand.” In other words, don’t expect the bon mots that work on your English TA and the occasional cute American Studies major to translate into cover letter gold.

DO

–Check out the UCS website. Skip the perfunctory and awkward UCS appointment and take a look at UCS’s rundown of Yale-sponsored internships as well as the eRecruiting website, which features a large database of internships that you probably won’t get. Still worth a try.

–Consider studying aroad. If you want to experience study-abroad but feel weird about missing a whole semester at Yale, a summer abroad is an ideal compromise. If you receive financial aid during the school year, the same aid will apply toward one summer abroad. And if you go abroad through a Yale Summer Session program, you may end up with tons of class credit–as many as four full credits for some language programs. In other words, you’ll never have to take five classes again, if you so choose.

–Use alumni networks. Contact your high school to see if they have an alumni database that you can access. If you can get contact info for alumni who graduated from your high school and from Yale, they may be your best bet for finding an internship. Even if you can only find five or six of these people, they are more likely to take a personal interest in helping you find something even if they can’t offer you a job themselves. This is actually good advice. I emailed ten of these double-alumni last year on a lark and about half of them immediately offered to help me find an internship.