Viewpoint: 4 reasons to take a gap year
Going straight to college after high school isn't your only option out there.
Ah, the freshman year icebreaker. Whether you’re enrolling in a Southeastern Conference university or a small liberal arts school, chances are you’ll spend your first two weeks of college hearing about other students’ summers while simultaneously forgetting everyone’s name. Wouldn’t it be nice if your own summertime icebreaker was a little more exciting than “I mastered freaky-fast sandwich making at Jimmy John’s”?
Enter the gap year. While no official statistics exist stating exactly how many American students take a year off between graduating high school and starting college, both college counselors and independent programs note a rise in the gap year’s popularity. According to a 2010 Time magazine article, the number of Americans enrolling in Projects Abroad, a gap-year program that links students with volunteer jobs all over the world, had quadrupled since 2005. Yet stigma surrounding the gap year persists in the United States, with only 1.2% of first-year college students deferring admission to college for a year or more, according to 2011 data from the Higher Education Research Institute.
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While they may still be more popular in other countries, gap years are a great way to figure out what you want to do in college long before you open the course guide. Here are the top four reasons to consider taking a gap year.
• Save cash before classes start
Between classes, your first 10-page paper and navigating dorm food, freshman year can be rough enough without adding a 20-hour workweek to the mix. Why not save up money before you even start orientation? With a year between earning a diploma and enrolling in classes, you can stockpile enough cash to get you through a semester worth of 2 a.m. pizza without having to work part time on campus.
• Get ahead on your language requirement
¿Se habla español? A language-oriented gap year program can help put you on the fast track to not failing your first year of college Spanish classes. From spending four months hiking through Peru to strolling through Montpellier, there’s no better way to prepare for a language requirement than to spend time in a native-speaking country.
• Boost your resume
Not many can enter college with a full-time internship under their belt. But with a year available before starting school, you can start building up your resume before you ever walk on to campus. While unpaid internships can be the bane of college students’ existence, the lack of a paycheck isn’t so bad when you’re still living at home. If you’re itching to get some big-city experience before you start school, programs like World Endeavors or Gap Year can hook you up with internships around the world, like a radio journalism gig in Buenos Aires or a position at an art museum in Madrid.
• Have an instant icebreaker
If you have to do small talk, might as well make it interesting. If nothing else, a gap-year experience can give you something to talk about when you have to go around the room and blabber about your summer vacation. Or at least, something a little more interesting than, “Well, I finished watching The Office in my parents’ basement ... twice.”
Melanie Kruvelis is a Spring 2013 Paste BN Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.
This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.