CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For Jessica Phillips-Patrick, the summer internship grind began after she graduated from high school in Bethesda, Md., when she landed a position with a biotechnology company working on the human genome project. She had the same internship the next summer, after her freshman year at Stanford University. The following year, having decided she liked economics more than biology, she got an internship at the Federal Reserve Board.

This summer the logical internship might have been with an investment banking firm, where many of her fellow juniors are putting in 12-hour days in hopes of being rewarded with a job upon graduation.

Ms. Phillips-Patrick decided, however, to take a break from all that. Instead of a high-powered internship this summer, she is mixing strawberry daiquiris and piña coladas behind the bar at Fire and Ice in Harvard Square. She says she is doing something she has not had enough of in recent summers: having fun. And the money is not bad. A recent four-day stretch brought in $350 in tips.

After spending their summers accumulating the experiences deemed necessary for admission to the right college or graduate school or for an early jump on a career, Ms. Phillips-Patrick and some of her peers are mounting a rebellion. They are getting off the résumé-building track this summer.

To Ms. Phillips-Patrick, who made flash cards to help her memorize the drink recipes, bartending is downright exotic. "Instead of sitting at a desk, you get to talk to different people and mix drinks and make a huge vat of strawberry purée in the back and organize a walk-in closet with all the beers," she said as she soaked up the sun in Harvard Yard on an afternoon off.

She and her Stanford roommate, Julie Fitzgerald, a veteran of internships with the United Nations and a refugee resettlement house, both decided to be waitresses this summer.

"We're tired of doing things for the résumé or doing things that aren't fun because we're supposed to," Ms. Fitzgerald said. For her the pattern began in high school, she said, when she felt she had to belong to the right clubs and take up the right sports to get into the right college.

These are the organization kids, as David Brooks, the author of "Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There," calls them, describing their sleep-deprived, goal-oriented, résumé-building lives. College, he says, is just one step on the continual stairway of advancement.

"These kids take these high-powered internships in part because they know all spring their fellow students are going to ask them: `What are you doing this summer?' and they're terrified of saying, `I'm going to be a camp counselor,' " said Mr. Brooks, who will begin writing a column for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times in September. "It's a sign you're not a success." (Mr. Brooks, 41, was a camp counselor during his undergraduate years at the University of Chicago.)

Ms. Phillips-Patrick's mother, Martha, an independent college counselor, said she knew of a senior at a Midwestern college who felt compelled to ask her uncle, a psychologist, whether it was all right for her to be a camp counselor this summer. The young woman feared that she should be lining up a more impressive-sounding internship.

"He told her, `Do what makes you happy,' " Martha Phillips-Patrick said. So the young woman went boldly off to camp.

Michael Newton, a senior at Dartmouth, has also decided to do what makes him happy. Instead of taking an internship at, say, Goldman Sachs in Manhattan, he is in Seattle, working at a nonprofit organization that runs a needle exchange for heroin users and spending his free time hiking and mountain biking.

"The internship game has, in essence, become so competitive and unrewarding that many people are just not playing anymore," Mr. Newton, 21, wrote in an e-mail message.

While many internships offer valuable enrichment and opportunities for a close-up look at professions students may be considering, others sound more exciting on paper than they are in reality.

"I went into all these jobs thinking I'd be doing incredible stuff, going to meetings with legislators, participating in lobbying visits," said Jesse Evans, a recent Stanford graduate who has spent the last three summers as an intern working on environmental and gay and lesbian causes. "Instead I color-coded files."

This summer, Mr. Evans, 22, who plans to return to Stanford for a master's degree in cultural and social anthropology, is working as a waiter at an Italian restaurant in Silver Spring, Md. He is learning a lot, he says. "You don't just need to learn to hobnob with political elites in Washington and the pretentious people in the organizations," he said. "You need to deal with regular old people."

He can also use the $10 to $15 an hour he is earning. Mr. Evans, whose mother manages a health food store in Arizona, said he had to take out extra loans to afford his internships, which were either unpaid or offered minimal pay.

While the conventional wisdom among Mr. Evans's peers is that a summer job as a waiter, a bartender or a camp counselor is not something to put on a résumé, William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard, takes the opposite view.

"I actually think there are employers out there and graduate school admissions people who would appreciate the candor and the honesty and, frankly, the imagination that one would demonstrate by doing these kinds of things," said Mr. Fitzsimmons, 59, who spent his own summers as a Harvard undergraduate working in his father's convenience store and gas station, and as a recreational counselor. "I can't tell you how many very good college essays I've read from students who said they've worked during the summers at a fast-food place, and have had quite insightful things to say about the experience, and the range of people they've met."

Determined to get off the traditional summer internship grid, Patrick Thronson, a Harvard senior, is earning $6.50 an hour at the Hole in the Wall bookstore at Wall Drugs, the sprawling roadside stop in Wall, S.D. He pays $20 a week for a room in a house with five other young men. With 150 other college students working at Wall Drugs, he said, "it's kind of like being a freshman at a small rural college in a really small town."

"I guess I thought I have the rest of my life to work on my résumé," said Mr. Thronson, 21, a philosophy major from Salt Lake City. "I won't necessarily have the chance to do this again."

Elizabeth Ferlic, who just graduated from Duke University in pre-med studies, spent the last two summers working at a hospital in her hometown, Omaha. She relished the work. But last summer, when she took an organic chemistry course at a local university, was exhausting.

As an antidote, she is spending this summer teaching windsurfing in Newport, R.I. "I was happy the minute I crossed the bridge into Newport," Ms. Ferlic said. "I bike 25 minutes to the beach every morning, teach windsurfing for eight hours, bike home, shower, nap and do the night life. I fall into bed at 2 or 3, get up at 8, and do it all over again."

In Manhattan, Katie Crawford, a Dartmouth senior, says she longs for a week at the beach. She says she loves her internship at the United Nations. But with two nights reserved for Law School Admissions Test classes, and other nights taken up with studying for the test, she does not have a lot of free time.

"I feel that sort of sensation — it's the summer, I can't waste it, I have to do something with it," Ms. Crawford said. "Summer, where you're taking a break, doesn't really exist anymore. That was in middle school."