A gap year is a year off from conventional schooling–one which usually entails working and gaining hands-on experience in a particular field. Some people take one before entering college, others during the years pursuing their undergraduate degree, and still others in between graduating from college and pursuing masters or doctorate-level education. During gap years, students have the option of staying home to work, going abroad to an affiliated school in which they’re still learning but the workload isn’t as heavy, or being a missionary.
Cons
Location
It really depends on where you’re doing your gap year. If you’re taking a gap year away from home and school, what if you end up disliking where you’re at? Unfortunately, you’ve already paid to be there and made a commitment to stay, so you’re pretty much stuck. If you’re staying home, the con would be that you may not be able to experience anything new, and you may become a little stir crazy. On top of that, you might struggle with the contrast between, at school, having a lot of freedom to go wherever you want, whenever you want, as opposed to respecting your parents’ rules back at home.
Friends move on
While you will most likely keep up with what is going on at school in many ways, the reality is that your friends will continue to have fun and live their lives without you being with them. You may feel it while you’re away just as much as when you come back and realize all the inside jokes and memories you can’t relate to.
Taking longer to finish up
Taking a gap year typically means that you will take longer to complete your degree, resulting in a later start time for graduate school or getting a job. This can be frustrating closer to the end of your time at school, when most of your friends are leaving while you stay behind, and it unfortunately makes it easier for you to make comparisons about your life progress with someone else’s.
Pros
New Mindset
Being removed from what has been routine in your life is unsettling in the best ways. You will get to learn so much about yourself, about people, how to be a better problem solver, how to be resourceful, and what your own value system is. You will get challenged daily and you will have more space to experience different versions of you.
Motivation
If you’ve gotten too used to the people, classes, buildings, or food in this area and are tired of the fact that half of the year is gray and cold, it’s hard to find the motivation to just push through one day, let alone a whole year. Sometimes having a year away can be what helps give you a push to finish the rest of your undergraduate career. Especially if you take a gap year in between Junior and Senior year, you will have such a big prize to look forward to and won’t have to take so long to achieve it.
We are not Hamsters
In the United States, we have a problem with creating environments that make people feel that they have to constantly keep moving. That consequence of that means that we work all the time and are made to feel bad when we have personal emergencies, we feel guilty for using vacation time, or we have this need to finish school in a certain time frame. I encourage you to take a step off that hamster wheel and remember you’re not a slave to anybody’s expectations or timeline, not even your own. This is said a lot, but it is true nonetheless: age is just a number. Whatever you have in mind will be accomplished at one point or another, just make sure to actually have fun in the process.
My year abroad as a missionary was characterized by all the points I made. I struggled not with the location in itself, but all the moving pieces within the location, such as the struggle between the missionaries with the locals and the struggles between the missionaries themselves. The issues we were having were exacerbated for me when I would open my phone and see 100+ messages on the group chat I had with my friends and was reminded of all the fun they were having while I was struggling (no fault to them). Even though I’m two years removed from that experience, every once in a while I come close to letting myself resent it when I realize my friends are moving onto the next chapter of their life soon and I’ll still be here in Berrien.
As depressing as that may sound, if I were given the opportunity to do it again, I would, because the pros do outweigh the cons and also can be viewed in a positive light (something I learned to do being abroad). Feeling “stuck” where I was made me find ways to make my time there enjoyable and taught me to create a reality that I liked instead of waiting for it to just happen. My friends making their own memories made me realize I could also do that for myself. This realization gave me the opportunity to meet new people, get to know my professors better, and get involved in activities that I hadn’t done prior to leaving. Lastly, I’m choosing to view not finishing at the same time as my friends as a bonus self-growth year. What does that look like? I’m not sure yet, but I’m excited to find out!
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.