The dog-days are officially over. No more fun in the sun. No more sleeping. No more reading for fun. That’s right, we are back at it—but that doesn’t mean that the days of 90-degree heat are over, it’s just not called summer anymore.

If you’re like me, the best thing you did this summer was fart and your dog jumped. And the second best thing you did this summer was fart again, and your dog sniffed the air.

That doesn’t mean everyone else was slacking. In fact, all your friends were conducting cancer research with world-renowned professors to save the polar bears in sub-Saharan Africa. Which means you, the mediocre Grotonian, are in dire need of exclusive internships to talk about. And we have compiled an expert, peer-reviewed instruction manual for you featuring real examples from real-life slackers:

1)  No activity is too fake. That’s right, literally anything you can think of will make people think you did stuff. Your fellow Grotonians will probably not question you because they are too busy thinking about their own complacency. Ethan Yan ’27 is a certified master of the craft. Describing his ongoing research, Ethan spent part of his summer continuing to work on his little AI project that detects acute leukemia.

2) Use small words in big ways. When constructing the perfect narrative, make sure to use words that people can understand. For example, Zeynep Erkoc ’26 describes her summer research as “Working on developing multi-code-rate autoencoders to aid complex signal transformation and analysis.” Notice how this sentence is completely incomprehensible as a whole, but each word can be somewhat puzzled together, leaving Zeynep’s audience feeling good about themselves but not willing to question or engage further out of fear of sounding less than.

3) You met great people. When your friends ask how it was, always respond, “I met some really great people.” If you are feeling extra confident add, “I mean, just truly smart, brilliant people.” This should keep them from asking too many questions. When asked about his summer, Daniel Mao ’26 responded that he spent six weeks in Spain on an archeological dig (he claimed to have found a fragment of Pliny the Elder’s writing). But the highlight of his trip was “the friends I made along the way.” In actuality, Daniel confessed, he spent the summer stalking people on LinkedIn.

I am sure you, the disgustingly average Grotonian, are probably thinking to yourself “Gee whiz! I didn’t realize how easy it was to pretend that I did something this summer!” And it is that easy. In fact, everyone is doing it.

Sure, some if not all your teachers will tell you that it’s OK to take a break from the Groton Grind during the summer, relax, and enjoy things that you find interesting outside of academics.

But don’t be fooled. This naive sentiment, like the charity organization you founded to build affordable housing for hairless turtles, is of course also a lie.