Every year, people talk about wanting to experience new things and do something they have yet to try over the summer, and as spring break swiftly approaches, USN students are beginning to make and finalize their summer plans.
For students looking to earn a bit of money or just help out the USN community, working or volunteering at USN summer camps might be the perfect opportunity.
USN’s summer camps started over 25 years ago in hopes of giving students new experiences and ways to stay active over the summer. Since then, the camps have turned into a wide range of programs open to students all across middle Tennessee.
In 2025, USN served 1,028 individual campers, who filled 3,186 camp registrations. As of March 2, there are already 2,963 registrations, and that number continues to grow each week.
This year USN will offer 240 different summer camps. The camps hosted strictly at the Edgehill Campus will begin June 1 and end July 10. The next two weeks, “the dog days of summer,” will take place at the River Campus.
A wide range of activities are offered, including triathlon camp, various sports camps, ceramics camp, young filmmakers, kid detectives, mock trial, Dungeons and Dragons, songwriting, and more.
Jason Shuster, director of summer camps and high school math teacher, is proud of the range of activities that USN gives students over the summer.
“I love that kids can have very different experiences throughout the summer,” he said.
During the summer, USN is also a hub for Horizons, a national summer enrichment program offered to low income public school students separate from USN summer camps that provides students in grades kindergarten through twelfth grade with academic and extracurricular programs to do over the summer to build skills and prevent learning loss.
The Horizons program was introduced to USN in 2013 and began in 2014. Since then, USN has partnered with many neighboring public schools in hopes of giving high achieving students activities to keep them busy and work their brains during the summer.
As someone who has volunteered at a dance camp, I can confirm that working at USN over the summer is extremely fun and rewarding. It gives students a chance to work with younger kids, which is a good skill to have whether someone may want to do that more in the future or not. Counselors acquire leadership skills and learn how to work with other people, teachers or helpers, to create functional and enjoyable space for everyone involved.
Since there are 240 camps this summer, high school students who may want to help out would not have a hard time finding one that matches their interests. More information about working at USN this summer can be found at usn.org/summer. Here students can browse through the catalog of summer camps, select the one that they would like to work at or volunteer for, and reach out to the director running it to see if they want help.
Working at a USN summer camp is a great opportunity that gives students new skills and a lot of fun.
