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Teens can learn more from retail and service work than at a fancy summer internship in an office

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Burger King or Goldman Sachs?

That’s not the exact choice most teens get to make when choosing a summer job, but the question is: What’s the better bet?

Well, if Goldman Sachs is really calling . . . hmm. But a grueling, sweaty summer gig can give kids more grit than they’d get at any air-conditioned accounting internship.

And grit can take you places plain old resume-building can’t.

“For two summers in Ireland when I was 16 and 17 I worked on a farm,” says Mike Neill, a writer in New Jersey. “My main duty involved dagging the sheep before they could be shorn.”

“Dagging” is the process of removing the clumped wool from a sheep’s behind.

Lesson learned? Save up and leave. Neill got himself to New York the next year and found a tabloid reporting job. “Basically doing the same kind of work, but without the lingering smell.”

A stinky, real-world job can light a fire in kids. “One of the benefits of a low level job is learning how to practice goal-directed behavior,” says Matt Fastman, a clinical psychologist at Cognitive Behavioral Associates in Great Neck, Long Island. Once you realize that the amount........

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