In the first of a series, our writers reflect on the lessons they learned from a summer encounter with work It was the summer after my first year of university, and I was back in uniform for the first time since school. The blue baseball cap and polo shirt combination was not glamorous, and I hated wearing my hair up, but the ice-cream parlour in the Snowdonian village of my childhood was hiring, and I needed the work. These sorts of summer jobs are on the decline among young people with technology at their disposal, but I didn’t have the option to become an influencer or an internet millionaire. Back home, everyone I knew worked a summer job , but my distinctly posher university friends were off on adventures: backpacking around South America, repairing to their families’ houses in the south of France, Interrailing . I had already wasted a substantial wodge of cash on a quixotic attempt at a law degree that had me begging fervently to transfer courses before the tedium of property law actually killed me.