Defer.
If you’re reading this, hopefully you’re breathing a sigh of relief knowing the college application process is coming to a close. You’ve been accepted – congratulations!
But before you start buying decorations for your dorm room walls, consider for a moment following a road less traveled in America: Take a gap year.
That’s what I did before starting at Northwestern University: I coached soccer in Costa Rica; worked on a farm on the Ecuadorian coast; backpacked through the Himalayas in India; taught English and lived in an orphanage in Ethiopia; lived in a Liberian settlement camp in Ghana; taught English in central Uganda; and (after throwing out my original final stop), I ended my year living at a school for mentally and physically disabled children in northern Uganda.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been as scared as I was at age 18 boarding my flight to Costa Rica to begin this journey. But without a doubt, it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. The push I needed came from an eye-opening month in Honduras the summer after my junior year of high school. I lived in a homestay, helped build a house for a family in need and hitched rides everywhere. I knew I wanted to experience more and see more of the world. In tandem with applying to college, I spent my senior year planning my gap year. I spent hours upon hours researching programs, budgeting, and plotting. With support from my parents and teachers (for which I am eternally grateful), I planned my year.
I won’t pretend I knew it all, or even that I know it all now. As the year went on, I struggled greatly with how best to be in the developing world. How do we visit the developing world and contribute to communities without doing harm? Should I have gone to one location and invested in one community? These are questions I don’t have answers to even now, but if given the chance, I’d do it all over again the same way. My gap year was challenging and confusing, invigorating and tiring, thrilling and scary. I wrote at the time in my final blog post:
“I have come to the realization that we live in a very strange paradox: we know so much about the world but most of what we know we see through someone else’s eyes. We see through the eyes of a journalist, a teacher, a textbook, an author, a director, and even sometimes a regular old 19-year old from NYC taking a year to travel before heading to college…But I leave you with this to ponder over: that if you think you understand the world, than maybe you haven’t seen enough of it with your own eyes.”
One of my main concerns with taking a gap year was that I might feel “behind” when I got back – academically and socially – and my parents and friends shared that concern. While every once in a while I feel a tinge of this sentiment, primarily, I feel great pride in having forged my own path. My gap year emboldened me to continue doing so: to find the classes, friends and opportunities that fit me.
I know without question my gap year made me a better student and professional, and it probably would for you as well. A study at Middlebury College found that students who took a gap year showed a consistently higher GPA than those who did not. American Gap Association, an organization advocating for increased participation in gap years (and a resource for opportunities), cites a study from The Gap Year Advantage that students who take gap years report being overwhelmingly more satisfied with their jobs.
I can attest to this personally. Living and traveling alone, I was faced with the challenge of making my experience tangible not only to those who weren’t there but to those who might never get to experience anything like it. It was through this challenge that I found storytelling and then journalism. While abroad, I transferred (within Northwestern) to the Medill School of Journalism. I sought opportunities to keep going abroad – working as a magazine reporter in Uganda and a writer/producer in South Africa – among other stops on the way to my current role as a producer for CNN Tonight.
There is no one right way to take a gap year. And let’s be clear: you do NOT need to travel across the globe to get out of your comfort zone. If you can’t get “away,” get somewhere different. And if finances are your main concern, please don’t let that stop you. Yes, I was lucky to have financial support from my parents. But you can work on a farm in exchange for room and board via WWOOF all over the world. Additionally, many programs will pay you to teach English abroad. Don’t limit yourself to American companies whose programs tend to be more structured and more expensive. I spent many hours on Transitions Abroad exploring their vast collection of resources for volunteer, work and teaching abroad. There are opportunities for all budgets and all personalities. All you have to do is find them.
If you have any interest in taking a gap year, I implore you to do it. Come on, I dare you.
Molly Lister is a producer at CNN.