(U-WIRE) MEDFORD, Mass. — When considering their summer pastimes, students applying to college these days have a dizzying array of options available to them. But as more and more college applicants are pushed into volunteering or pursuing internships, minimum-wage jobs are falling by the wayside.

An article in the Boston Globe this summer noted that the old-fashioned minimum wage summer job is becoming a thing of the past. As a result, students who hold steady jobs are making admissions offices take notice.

“I’ve been an admissions officer for 25 years, and … definitely fewer kids work than did a while ago,” Tufts University Director of Undergraduate Admissions Susan Ardizzoni said. “I would say it is less common for students to have work as a part of their extracurricular life than it was at one point.”

Though the admissions office doesn’t keep strict numbers, Dean of Admissions Lee Coffin estimated to the Boston Globe that only about a quarter of current Tufts applicants have had steady job experience.

“I ended up with just a regular job,” instead of an internship, freshman Paul Magel, who spent his summer filing, said. “The main reason was I wanted the spending money later on.”

Magel is thinking of doing an internship next year for experience, he added.

Choosing a normal job instead of an internship isn’t a negative thing, said Ardizzoni.

“It’s not so much that we have a preference for how students spend their time; it’s that we want students to do things and be involved in things that are meaningful to them,” she said.

Sometimes, exotic internships aren’t so impressive when they don’t show evidence of what Ardizzoni described as a “pattern of interest or involvement.” This pattern can take the shape of an hourly-wage job, if pursued for a long period of time.

“A student that has [worked] … not just for six months, but if they’ve worked for two years, that’s something that’s more unusual and something that we would probably stop and take note of,” Ardizzoni said.

“Students … may have a two- or four-week trip doing community service overseas, and there’s no other evidence of that in any other groups or organizations they’ve been involved in, yet they talk about it as being an incredibly meaningful experience,” she said. “That’s when it begins to lose its value [on an application].”

Such resume-padding is inevitable in the highly competitive game of college admissions. Freshman Mike Niconchuk, who worked two jobs this summer and has had internships in the past, agreed.

“Things like AP classes, straight As, and great SAT scores mean nothing anymore. … It’s hard to stand out,” he said in an e-mail to the Daily. “Things like internships helping the disenfranchised are now some of the only things that can give an applicant any out-of-the-ordinary recognition.”

Regarding his own internships, Niconchuk said that “there’s always the perk that it looks good on a resume … but in all seriousness, that was never the motivation … I’m just lucky to have done everything I did in high school because I loved it, not because I felt obligated to.”

Along with Niconchuk, other students, such as freshman Kara Takasaki, say they have pursued internships out of genuine desire to gain experience in a field. Takasaki turned down a higher-paying job in an unrelated field to take a paid internship at a hospital in Hawaii, where she lives.

“I am planning to go into medicine and health sciences, and the internship’s description described an experience that would help me become aware of what I was getting myself into,” she said in an e-mail. Takasaki described getting valuable experience in her career field as her motivation for taking the internship, and that her internship compared favorably to charity work she had done before.

“I had also volunteered previously at a different hospital, and I was disappointed in the experience because there wasn’t a lot of opportunity as compared to what the internship entailed,” she said.

Though not all students are fulfilling a pattern of involvement, Niconchuk said that their internships are still helpful.

“Regardless of the motivation, a rich suburban kid working with the poor is going to have a really transformative experience,” he said. “Hopefully, an internship or volunteer work will produce a sense of guilt for having used those ‘have nots’ as a stepping [stone] for your collegiate choices.”

Niconchuk cautioned against being too pessimistic.

“We shouldn’t be too cynical about volunteer work,” he said. “I know that I, along with plenty of my new freshmen classmates, would love to hop on a plane to Chad or Jordan or Kenya and work at a refugee camp, with all sincerity and no ulterior motives.”