My Honest Experience Working at Camp Laurel
My summer working as a counselor at Camp Laurel in Readfield, Maine just ended and I thought I would share my experience as I couldn’t find a lot of information about the staff experience online.
Pay: Most American counselors make $2,500-$2,800 base pay, plus a $500 bonus for staying the entire summer. International counselors make around $2,000 and do not get a bonus. Some make less than $2,000. Pre-camp is an additional $500.
Living: Counselors live in a cabin with 5-15 kids, all the same age and gender, and 1-3 co-counselors. You have no private space unless you’re in a bathroom stall- all cabins are just one big room. You sleep on a bunk bed and are provided a shelf for your stuff. You eat all three meals with your kids and spend rest hour and the entire evening with them.
Time Off: The staff is split into “C” and “D” staffs, who all are off at the same time (So if C staff is on, D staff is off). Days off are S-Days for the kids, where instead of doing regular program they do field day type activities or go on out of camp trips. When you have a full day off, you are free to leave at 7PM the night before and must check in at midnight the following day. Staff alternate having either rest hour (2:30-3:20PM) or bedtime-midnight off. Bedtimes are earlier for younger kids and later for older kids, so counselors of older kids get less time off. Basically the only thing to do during time off on regular days is hang out in the staff areas- two buildings, an old one (the barn) with vending machines and old couches and chairs, and a new one (the farmhouse) with 2 TV rooms and more couches. There is also a staff dock which you can swim off of during rest hours off. During rest hour camp also provides free iced coffee and soda in the farmhouse for the staff that’s off. On days off, you’re very reliant on who you know that owns a car. It was often a point of stress figuring out who could drive who on off days. I highly recommend bringing your car if at all possible. The thing to do for the most part was go get an AirBnB and party. Everything is super far away from camp, so we drove at least an hour and a half each off day to get to where we were going.
Program: Acadia & Rangeley (little kid campuses) counselors spend all day with their kids. Everybody else teaches some sort of activity or sport in addition to being a cabin counselor. The kids go to five programs a day and alternate A and B days, so they have ten programs on their schedule total. They are responsible for getting to each of their programs themselves, save for Acadia and Rangeley. It feels a lot like school- there’s a bell that dismisses them and starts the beginning of the next period and each period you teach a class.
The Kids: Something I found very difficult was relating to the kids. They are the children of millionaires, founders, and CEOs. They live in 30 million dollar houses in Connecticut, New York, or Florida and travel internationally several times a year. Money is nothing to them. An insane amount of waste happens at camp- the kids will throw away full plates of food. On the second-to-last day they had steak and lobster for dinner and I saw many kids toss entire lobsters into the trash. College days, which is four days of field day where everyone competes on one of two teams, broke with fireworks and a laser show. They do not reuse towels- we got fresh white towels delivered each morning and they picked up the dirty ones to be washed and folded. Laundry was also done for us- they ship laundry to a wash and fold service in New Hampshire weekly.
The kids do not understand that they are still living in luxury, just in the woods instead of in Manhattan. From their perspective they believe they are being borderline neglected in the boonies. They complain about anything and everything. As a counselor, you are hyper involved in their day-to-day lives. You mediate petty arguments between them and their friends. You help them make their bed and pick up their dirty clothes. At the end of each day, you write a report on every single one of your kids on how their day went.
Making Friends/Relationships: I found it fairly easy to make friends, but I’m also a pretty outgoing person. Some people seemed to me to have few friends or exist on the fringes of friend groups. It’s important to put yourself out there, especially during orientation. You get very close with the counselors in your campus (age & gender group). Overall everyone is friendly, even to people they don’t know well. You have a pretty significant incentive to be nice to each other since you see everyone every single day. You also are a lot closer with the staff you have time off with. Trying to date at camp is exhausting and awkward. You have such limited time off and are in “public” basically all the time at camp. Plenty of people make it work or at very least hook up on off days.
Miscellaneous Things: Camp stores your suitcases for you, so you don’t have to deal with having a suitcase in the cabin all summer. Within the first few days of orientation there is a bus to Wal Mart so you can buy whatever you forgot at home. There’s a staff trip halfway through the summer to a beer garden/restaurant where they pay for all your food.
I hope this is helpful to someone and let me know if you have any questions!