Summer time is a time for a break. Students should be teenagers and have some fun. Having said that, the one thing you probably don't want to do is just sit around and play Xbox all summer. Colleges want to see that you are engaged and active, I would say in 1 of 4 categories. Number 1: You can get a job. Number 2: You can get an internship, which a lot of families think is impossible for teenagers, but honestly, if a teenager goes into a company, or a business, and says, " I want to donate my time for free." You'd be amazed at how many teenagers can get internships. 3: you can study abroad. You can take a trip somewhere to do something that exposes you to new ideas. The 4th thing, is to take a class. Now taking a class can be taking a class like AP U.S. History so that you free up a time the next year to take something else. Or you can take something that you couldn't take in high school. So, I had a student, for example, who's only major extra-curricular was soccer, but he was really interested in psychology. So, what he did was he took a community college class in psychology 1 over the summer before his senior year, and he got a job working as a pool boy at a local hotel. In his essay, he actually wrote about an experience he had while working as a pool boy, in which he used some of those psychology things that he learned about in class. So, it's not what you do in summer, it's that you do something, and hopefully, you're doing something that you're interested in, because that's going to help you down the road.