Summer’s approaching fast and you don’t know what you’ll do or what your kids should be doing during holidays. Summer camps are excellent but not available always and cost some money.
As a college student or parent of one, you would wonder what’s best for this summer. Therefore, let me tell you there’re 21 best summer jobs for college students that anyone can take.
And they don’t require much skills, qualifications or even fulltime work.
If this sounds interesting, continue reading. I will be writing about the 21 best summer jobs you can take as college student.
Best Summer Jobs for College Students
These 21 best summer jobs I’m listing would enable you to make enough money to buy something you’ve always wanted, save for education or future or simply use for family and household expenses.
The amount of money you make depends purely on the number of hours you’re willing to work.
1. Data Entry Operator
Data entry is the best summer job for every college student. It allows you to work with flexible hours and is rather simple.
All you need to do is key-in certain data on templates that your employer provides from the raw data. You can take this job on an hourly or assignment basis.
You’ll find countless such data entry operator jobs on any good recruitments portal. And it’s a work from home job too.
2. Transcriptionist
We’ve all heard about medical transcriptions. Indeed, medical transcriptions and coding jobs are high paying summer jobs for college students.
However, there’s plenty of other transcription jobs that you’ll find that require skills you’re learning at college.
These include financial transcriptions, legal transcriptions, business transcriptions, technical transcriptions among others.
In fact, these transcription jobs pay much higher than medical transcriptions. Find such jobs on Rev.
3. Ice Cream Parlor Attendant
Summer is a time when everyone loves to gorge on ice cream. Invariably, ice cream parlors face a rush from customer, especially children and teenagers.
Therefore, they hire part-time staff as ice cream parlor attendants. Your job is to serve scoops of ice cream or help the salesperson in their duties.
You may also have to assist serving smoothies and other stuff that’s usually sold from ice cream parlors.
4. Pet Walker
Elderly people, as well as working persons, require somebody to walk their pets- especially dogs- daily.
And they’re willing to pay quite good money if you can walk their pet around for some time every morning and evening. Over the years, pet walking has become a special profession by itself.
That’s because pet walkers also have to ensure they pick up after their dogs and dispose of the waste at proper, designated places to avoid fines and penalties.
Additionally, pet walkers also have the job of ensuring that dogs are kept properly on leash and don’t get into fights.
5. Babysitter
Regardless whether you’re a female or male, if you have that special touch necessary to take care of infants and toddlers, there’s a lot of money to be made as babysitter.
Nowadays, there’re several organizations that offer babysitting services to families and single parents. And they always have vacancies for college students.
You can register at any of these agencies and work for weekly pay. Or you can advertise on Craigslist and charge on an hourly basis per child.
This is one of the excellent summer jobs for college students that know how to handle children.
6. Social Media Assistant
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms are proving an effective communications and marketing tool for companies small and large.
And for individuals that wish to create their own brand. Hence there’s a hug scope for social media managers and social media assistants.
Usually, social media managers have training and skills to handle the social media account of an organization or individual. But they can’t perform all tasks alone.
Hence, businesses also hire social media assistants. This is a superb work from home job where you’ll also learn some basic digital marketing skills.
7. Proofreader
Every wondered how local stationery suppliers and printing presses get addresses and other material right and without spelling or grammatical errors? They hire proofreaders.
For a summer job as college student, proofreading is something I would definitely suggest. All you require is excellent knowledge of grammar and use of punctuations.
If you have superb skills, it’s possible to work as an online or offline proofreader for the news media, book publishers as well as individual authors.
8. Micro-Tasking
Micro tasking isn’t a job by its own. Instead, it’s a term that signifies small and odd jobs that require just a few minutes of your time. And usually, these are online jobs.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (Amazon mTurk) offers such micro tasking jobs occasionally, and especially during peak shopping seasons.
Your job can involve anything such as finding duplicate pictures, wrong images, incorrect product descriptions, incorrect information and other errors.
There’re also micro-tasking apps that you can download on your smartphone to find offline tasks in your area. These include running errands.
9. Store Attendant
Store attendants are always in demand at supermarkets and malls, boutiques and other retail outlets. These are offline jobs.
Meaning, you’ll have to physically work at the store according to the timings that you and the employer agree. You won’t usually have to do the actual selling.
Your job would usually include checking that stuff is on proper shelves, guiding customers if necessary and helping elderly push their shopping trolleys among others.
Sometimes, you might also get a tip for delivering the trolley and helping load the stuff in a customer’s vehicle.
10. Bakery Helper
Bakery helper is an amazing summer job for every college student. You get to learn a lot of stuff such as baking your own cookies and cakes to the preparation of different kinds of bread.
And if you’re lucky enough, you’ll also pick up this fine art of decorating birthday and wedding cakes by working alongside a professional.
This is a superb job for several other reasons too. You’ll meet interesting people daily and learn about shopping habits of various customers.
And often, the owner will give you a bag of cookies for free, to take home.
11. Stocker
The next time you visit a Walmart, Kohl’s or Target, check how their shelves are well stocked. It’s not robots that do the job but students like you.
Supermarkets small and large require stockers to arrange stuff on their shelves before opening for the day and especially during peak shopping seasons.
The work involves arranging packets of food stuff or other things that a store sells in the right way.
And sometimes, you’ll have to refill these shelves more than once, if there’s some promotion or shopping season.
12. Labeler
A labeler also works for all sorts of stores. The job is fairly simple. You’ll have to affix labels with barcodes on all sorts of stuff from lingerie to expensive fragrances, salt to computer equipment.
That’s because a cashier will scan your label to prepare the shopping bill. Working as a labeler is indeed a complex job.
You’ll have to find the right price of stuff and print labels at the workplace. The next step is to affix these labels on the proper stuff and scan them to verify you’re not making an error.
This is also high paying summer jobs for college students. You can also work flexible hours, if the store stays open round-the-clock.
13. Food Delivery
If you have a vehicle such as car or motorbike, work as food delivery agent for Postmates or a neighborhood restaurant. They pay you per delivery.
Usually, you’ll get anything between $5 and $25 per delivery, depending upon the size of the order and distance.
You can earn more money if you also have to deliver liquor and pick it up on the way to the customer.
Since it’s a food delivery job, you can definitely expect some tips, though not as a rule. Most customers usually part with a small cash tip or add it to the bill under the ‘Tips’ head while paying online.
14. Radio Jockey
Working as radio jockey requires a lot of skills and public speaking talent. However, it’s not at all difficult to learn this job during summer as college student.
The reason: there’re dozens of community radio stations that operate within a small area and broadcast on Frequency Modulation (FM) channels.
If you show interest in the work, a radio station will usually hire you as assistant jockey. Means, you’ll assist the main RJ in playing music or chat with them to keep audiences amused.
15. Micro-Influencer
And if you’re a college student that’s part of the sports team or have large followers due to your talents, it’s easy to work as micro-influencer.
All you require is a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest account and some excellent skills that appeal to your followers. Local businesses look for micro-influencers to attract more clientele.
You can perform a few acts that would attract people to the business. Or speak about the pros and cons of something that would appeal to your followers and make them patronize a brand or service.
16. Decorator
Anyone that’s held a party during summers will testify that it can be a very daunting task. Balloons will pop due to temperatures and air conditioning can spoil the entire party ambience.
Hence, they outsource the task to event management companies and freelance event organizers. And these companies and organizers hire college students as party decorators during summer.
All you require is excellent creativity and the ability to decorate a home or office or party venue in the manner a client wants.
What’s more? You are also welcome at the party and get excellent tips for a job well done.
17. Camp Leader
Summer is all about summer camps too for school, high-school and college students as well as community organizations.
Usually, schools and colleges organize summer camps in collaboration with private operators that have the necessary expertise.
If you’ve been to a few school summer camps and have some skills, work as a camp leader for a group of students. You can choose the activity to lead students.
It could be anything from trekking to exploration, fishing or cooking, conducting sports events and games or even maintaining discipline among campers.
18. Mascot
Surely you’ve seen mascots dancing or cajoling pedestrians to visit a store or restaurant or some other business. Top restaurants hire mascots to attract more customers during festivals and promotions.
Others have one permanently as part of their marketing campaign. This is a very simple summer job for students- provided you can bear the warmth of that mascot costume.
All you need to do is stand outside the store for an hour or more and attract people to visit. You get paid by the hour for this task.
And it’s fun too since often you’ll be giving away free candy or something to passers-by.
19. Plumbing Assistant
Anyone that lives in America or Europe knows that plumbers charge a small fortune for their work.
And often, plumbers aren’t available easily, unless somebody has a maintenance contract with a large company.
Plumbers usually require someone to assist them in their complex work of fixing pipes, taps, showers, heaters, drainage systems and lots more. Hiring other skilled plumbers for the job means lesser profit.
Therefore, they hire college students during the summer months as plumbing assistants. This is a fabulous skill to learn since you can make a lot of money once you master the trade.
20. Script Writer
Script writers are people who help authors and playwrights to create drama scripts from their stories.
It’s one of the best summer jobs for college students, especially if you have that creative skills and love dramas, movies and TV shows.
The author will provide you with the basic manuscript of their book. You have to create dialogues for every character as though it’s real life people enacting the book before an audience.
I would recommend this summer job for every college student studying fine arts and performing arts as well as literature.
21. Blogger
Actually, I would love to mention blogger as the best summer jobs for college students on top of this list. However, there’s only one flipside. Bloggers don’t make money instantly.
It takes a lot of effort to create a successful blog and start earning money. However, if you’re willing to wait awhile for the money to pour in, start working as a blogger this summer as college student.
You can blog about almost anything under the Sun. Simply let your passion and writing skills flow to create excellent content.
Learn a few digital marketing tricks and tweaks from YouTube and other free resources.
A blogger has three sources of income: from Google AdSense which pays for displaying ads on your blog, paid or sponsored posts that companies or other bloggers want you to publish on your blog and affiliate marketing.
Closing Thoughts
As you can see, there’s a wide selection of great online and offline summer jobs for college students.
You can choose whatever suits your passion or needs. Often, students go for online and offline jobs since it helps them get a lot of money within a short time span.
And as I mention earlier, there’re several ways you can put this money to good use. Summertime is excellent for sharpening your skills and acquiring new ones.
Hence, a great summer job will definitely help you as college student.
