While Northwestern’s deeply pre-professional culture can cut deep and be incredibly pervasive, that doesn’t mean students haven’t found ways to relax and enjoy themselves this summer — albeit in their own NU way. 

Freshman Eliot Lee said he has spent most of his summer so far relaxing at home in Seattle. However, Lee said he has managed to come up with a few ways to keep himself occupied during the long summer days. 

Instead of typical hobbies like friendship bracelet-making and tanning, Lee’s idea of summer fun is working on independent computer science projects and messing around with artificial intelligence. 

“I went into the summer knowing that I wanted to play around with some of the AI stuff that’s out there because it’s developing at such a rapid rate,” he said. “Besides just playing around with it coding-wise, I think it’s really interesting to think about, from a philosophical standpoint, what it is going to mean when the entire world is run by super-powered ChatGPT?”

For one of Lee’s independent projects, he is focusing on the relationship between large language models — a type of learning algorithm that can recognize, predict and generate content by working with massive data sets — and finance and investments. 

Lee says that he feels he was later than most of his peers in the internship search, but not having an internship has actually been a blessing in disguise for him this summer. 

“I have a lot of time, and I don’t know when I’m going to have as much time to explore this or something else of this depth,” he said. 

Weinberg sophomore Amelia Rolighed also found time to pursue her own passion projects. 

The few weeks before her internship started provided a window of time, she said. 

“I was bored, and I felt myself trying to figure (out) something to do, so I took up a passion project,” Rolighed said. “I completely reorganized my bedroom, so I think finding something like that that you haven’t had time to do is really great because you feel so accomplished when you’ve done it.”

Rolighed said a main motivator behind her room renovation was her desire to avoid spending money on activities, as she says many summer pastimes have the tendency to be a money drain. 

In addition to avoiding spending money, Rolighed said she’s spent the summer so far looking into activities that are geared toward self-improvement. 

“I got into investing and started researching stocks because I wanted to think about how I could use my time when there was nothing else to do,” Rolighed said. “How can I use it to better myself instead of just wasting away all day?”

For those with internships or jobs over the summer, Rolighed recommends taking advantage of weekday nights as opportunities to hang out with friends or try new activities. 

While students might agree that NU’s pre-professional culture placed pressure on them to secure internships or jobs for the summer, finding time to partake in traditional summer activities and taking up new ones can be just as important. 

Like Rolighed, McCormick freshman Andrew White has used his free time this summer to improve on new skills. 

In particular, taking up golf has helped him relax after the stress of school, he said. 

“It’s really nice to see beginner’s improvement,” White said. “It’s something that brings me joy throughout my day to kind of offload some of the stresses that come from the internship.”

White said he prefers to golf and do activities with other people because he enjoys spending time with friends he wouldn’t ordinarily see during the school year and making the most of the time he has with them.

Looking toward the future, White, who is interested in investment banking as a career, anticipates that the rest of his summers moving forward might not offer as much free time as he has now, and he wants to use what time he does have now to the best of his ability.  

“I’m back with the high school friends doing the things we would do in high school with the weird ‘this could be one of the last times we do it together’ nostalgic feeling,” White said. 

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Twitter: @TabithaParent12

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