The writer is a graduate of Harvard and recounts his and others’ decisions to take a gap year.
By the spring of my senior year in high school, I was gasping toward the finish line. Though recently divested of most of my extracurricular obligations and well-consumed with that lovable illness commonly known as “senioritis,” it seemed that no amount of rest or relaxation could return me to those kinder, gentler days before the pace of high school heated up. In those days, I took a certain joy in my extracurricular participation and even, occasionally, in attending class. Yet I was on the last leg of a long and at times very challenging race, and I was having trouble putting one foot in front of the next. Though I tried a variety of remedies – sleeping more, going out on the weekends more, attempting to work even harder – nothing seemed to help me regain my healthier, more motivated attitude of the early laps; I still felt tired and lost. In short, I was burnt out.
It was during those middle weeks of the spring term that it began to occur to me that I was in no mindset to enter college and get anything worthwhile out of it. Though friends and advisors reminded me that I had nearly three months of summer to recover, three months didn’t sound like nearly enough time to regain my lost sense of purpose. After all, I’d already been relaxing for a month or so, and, if anything, I felt worse. Plus, like many of my classmates, I couldn’t exactly afford to spend the summer lying around by the pool: the oncoming costs of attending a private university meant that I would probably be working harder in the summer than during my senior spring.
My first exposure to the idea of a gap year came from the testimony of a friend who had graduated from my high school several years earlier. Having graduated at the top of his class and matriculated to Harvard, he had deferred his admission for a year to backpack through Europe, participate in outdoor adventure programs, earn some money, and spend a little time with the family he hadn’t seen much of during his hectic years of high school. It seemed like a daring move, and I was impressed with his range of gap year experiences. When I researched the possibility more thoroughly, I found that this phenomenon of taking a gap year, while much more common in Europe, was surprisingly well-practiced in the U.S. as well, and with almost entirely positive reaction from students.
Because a gap year sounded like it might be a solution to my exhaustion and loss of purpose, I began to explore whether or not it would possible. Knowing nothing more than what my initial research revealed, I first called Harvard admissions, where I had recently been accepted. Though I assumed a process for taking a gap year existed, I wondered if I had missed the deadline, or, even if I hadn’t, what kind of terrible bureaucratic maze faced me. To my surprise, my admissions officer told me simply to write the college a letter briefly outlining my plans for the year ahead, and they would hold my spot for the following academic year.
“And what else?” I asked, waiting for the other shoe to fall.
And nothing else, apparently. I could even take until the early summer to decide, I learned. They wouldn’t have trouble filling the empty bed. It turns out that a lot of colleges support and even encourage students to take gap years. As I later learned when I read it more closely, my actual letter of acceptance had itself suggested the idea. With the bureaucratic obstacles behind me, I turned to the central questions: Was a gap year really for me? And if so, what would I do?
Time Out or Burn Out
I wasn’t exactly breaking new ground when I suggested above that high school feels a bit like a race. Whether that race is against others or against oneself is up for debate, though it seems to me that those most prepared for the less structured, more self-driven experience of college are those who view it as the latter. In either case, the tendency is to take the pace out hard from the beginning, to push your limits, and to finish exhausted. And while these are formative aspects of the experience, they are also hazards to one’s emotional and mental – not to mention physical – health. Like any race, if you start too fast, you can end up struggling even to cross the finish line. Students and college admissions officers around the country are discovering that being “burned out” is something to take seriously.
In a recent article entitled “Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation,” Harvard Dean of Admissions William Fitzsimmons and others outline what they see as a growing contemporary trend in education. “Faced with the fast pace of growing up today,” they write, “some students are clearly distressed, engaging in binge drinking and other self-destructive behaviors.” They note that “counseling services of secondary schools and colleges have expanded in response to greatly increased demand” and that it is “common to encounter even the most successful students, who have won all the ‘prizes,’ stepping back and wondering if it was all worth it.” This description hits at the confusion I was feeling as high school drew to a close.
Uncertain about what I wanted to do with myself and unprepared to make the most of college education, I quickly became unsure of what, exactly, I had been working so hard for the past four years. In the opinion of Fitzsimmons, “burn-out is an inevitable result of trying to live up to alien goals.” Too often, students will confuse their own goals with those they imagine belong to admissions boards. Four years of working hard at something of no particular interest can quickly dampen the spirits and also cloud students’ conceptions of what really interests them. But “time out,” writes Fitzsimmons, “can promote discovery of one’s own passions,” which is ultimately the source of not only one’s happiness, but also one’s success in his or her chosen field. It is in that spirit that Harvard endorses the gap year option and that their letter of acceptance even suggests it. Fitzsimmons points out that “normally a total of about fifty to seventy students defer [Harvard] until the next year,” with “uniformly positive” results. Citing a poll conducted by Harvard’s daily student newspaper, the article reports that students who have taken a gap year “found the experience ‘…so valuable that they would advise all Harvard students to consider it.’”
The Places You’ll Go
While all students, to paraphrase Tolstoy, may be alike in their praise of the gap year, every gap year is praiseworthy in its own way. Students have spent gap years on all seven continents, doing everything from ice climbing to ice skating, reading books for pleasure to writing them. One Harvard student I know took a gap year to make some money working at home before departing for a surf camp in Jaco, Costa Rica, followed by two weeks of sea turtle conservation volunteer work outside of Tamarindo, where he lived in a little wooden hut on the beach with other volunteers. After that, he traveled to Australia, where he took a six week course at the University of Sydney before traveling up the continent’s east coast “hostel to hostel.” He told me, “I am very happy I took the gap year, as it gave me some fantastic perspective and expanded my worldview significantly.”
Another Yale student deferred admission to take a gap year and recently returned from a service trip to Nepal. She says that the experience is “changing my whole world – the way I look at people, at community, at relationships.” Before going to Nepal, she had spent a month and a half earning her pilot’s license in North Carolina and hiking the Long Trail in Vermont. In January, she will be practicing yoga at the Kripalu retreat; following that, she plans to hike the Appalachian Trail for the rest of the year. Of the experience, she notes that “it’s been hard to accept a degree of flexibility and incoherence to life, although it ends up being pretty freeing.”
Other students encounter less exotic destinations but find their time off enriching and valuable nonetheless. Some may fulfill their respective countries’ optional or mandatory terms of military service, while others will work to help defray the rising costs of college tuition. One Harvard freshman coming off a gap year said that his gap year was “not something I had planned, but something that was thrust upon me.” An international student from Zimbabwe, he spent most of his gap year working in the dealing room of his country’s largest bank. He calls the time off “an opportune moment to reflect on the achievement of completing thirteen years of primary education that allowed me to bring together the many lessons that I had learned in school and to put them to the test in a real life situation.” He explains that “When one is in school, he is more or less sheltered from the hustle and bustle that takes place in the real world; working at the bank helped me realize what I was really capable of, and helped me put it all together.”
A few days after high school graduation, I moved to Washington, D.C. to spend my gap year working as a legal assistant at a center city law firm. I had been interested in the law since childhood, so I felt like the job was a good fit. I lived in D.C. for a full year, during which time I cooked all my own meals, did all my own laundry, and shared sublet apartments with twenty-somethings who were asking themselves many of the same questions I had been asking myself. I was able to make it down to Haiti over the summer, but the real substance of my gap year experience was the independence I gained by living on my own in a major city, waking up every morning and going to work like everyone else. In the absence of anyone to tell me how to spend my time – in fact, in the absence of anyone who even noticed how I spent my time – I felt myself returning to a kind of a personal homeostasis, naturally gravitating toward the activities and aspects of my personality that were more naturally occurring. I rediscovered reading for pleasure, which the burden of homework and exams had essentially buried, and rediscovered the pleasure of exercising because it made me feel good rather than because it made me excel in athletic competition. The year was by no means always pleasurable. At times going to work every day felt like a strain; other times I missed the people I cared about back home. But when I returned home for the summer, I felt more like myself than I had in a very long time.
A New Vision – Getting Started
Having had time to work in the real world, travel, test my limits, and generally be myself in the absence of curricular expectations, I was ready to take Harvard head-on. When I arrived there, I was prepared to take advantage of the tremendous resources and great minds that a university has to offer, both in its faculty and its student body.
While a gap year is not for every student who doesn’t look forward to doing his homework every single day of the school year, it is certainly something to consider for any student who feels that today’s amplified pressure to succeed in the high school environment has caused a loss in the joy of learning or passion in life. Taking time off can help students to forge new visions of the world or to rekindle old ones that have been lost in the hectic pace and overly competitive nature of high school. Taking a year off is not a decision to be made at the drop of a hat. A student owes a choice concerning an entire year of his life a certain due diligence, which should include discussion with family members, guidance counselors, and of course his chosen college’s admissions office, as well as some personal reflection.
Financial needs as well as the all-important question of what one will actually do during the year off should also be considered. While many organizations and websites will – for a fee in most cases – help assign students to various intriguing options, oftentimes the best experiences are those that arise organically, perhaps during a chance encounter with someone interesting. When I began planning my gap year, I could never have guessed that attending a panel discussion at Georgetown University on the challenges facing Haiti and meeting the Executive Director of a small NGO that operates there would lead to one of my gap year’s best and most fulfilling adventures.
Regardless of what a student wants to do with his time off, there is often great value in stepping off the track for a moment to catch one’s breath. With a year in front of you to do whatever you want, you will learn a lot about yourself simply from the choices you make. As one gap year student relates, “There are a million doors for people to walk through and take advantage of what they have to offer, so it has also been a challenge to decide which doors to choose, and which positive, intriguing things to let go. I’m learning a lot about what it means to build an identity, what it means to be a good person, and what it means to be a person at all.” With four years of college ahead of you – four years that you have worked so hard and saved so much just to make possible – what could be a more valuable lesson?
For more information, visit Harvard’s Gap Year website.
