As the school year comes to a close, students begin to make plans for their summer vacations. Juniors’ summer goals this year include traveling, volunteering, working, and interning at major companies.

Junior Daniel Etra plans to spend his three school-free months working at Ramah Nyack. Etra was a camper there and is returning as a residential counselor, living with the children for a week and coming home on the weekends. He is excited to live there and share this “adult experience” with other Juniors, including Rafi Katz, Yoav Cohen, and Harry Klarfeld. Etra sees this as an “opportunity to learn” while having the “freedom of being an adult.”

Junior Zeva Landa is enjoying a five-week trip to Israel with Camp Yavneh this summer. As a camper for eight years, she is excited to venture out of the U.S. to visit kibbutzim and learn more about Israel. Later, Landa plans to attend a summer program for neuroscience at Columbia University. She completed the medical academy program at Georgetown University in 2021 and hopes to learn more about psychology this summer at Columbia.

Junior Michael Kaplan-Nolan is eager to visit France in June, touring the old Jewish Quarter and other parts of Paris with his family. In July, he will attend the Parsons Paris program, studying design and the architecture of France and learning about luxury goods in the fashion market. “I’m excited to see France. I’ve been taking French for three years, and I’m excited to use the language,” he remarked. 

Junior Maia Donath is spending her summer in the city, interning full-time at a plant-based food company called NotCo. Donath explains that NotCo, a Chilean food-tech company, works to produce plant-based alternatives to animal-based food products. The company uses artificial intelligence to create chemical formulas that have similar structures to animal-based food products. Donath hopes to “gain experience of a real job setting” and see “what food can look like in different industries.” This internship will allow her to explore her interests in marketing and business, as well as in food. If she is lucky, she says, she may get to travel to Chile, where NotCo’s headquarters is located, to work more closely with the company.

The juniors are looking forward to their summers, preparing to spend their time traveling, interning, working, and more.