The Gap Year Opportunity: A Lifetime Experience
A Gap year is a year spent taking time off between crucial stages of life. The concept of taking a gap year to introspect ourselves and prepare for the future in a better and organized manner is gaining popularity in the United States.
The Gap year opportunity is indeed a lifetime experience because it provides us the much needed time for traveling, volunteering, enjoying the solitude and learning a new language, or experiencing any number of other activities for personal growth.
The most common time students are willing to take a gap year is after the High School and before the university years. The thoughts of an individual at the time of getting admission in colleges get suppressed under the voices of mentors and elders.
Most of the time, the decisions of the students are influenced, and they choose a career stream in which they are least interested. The foundation of a beautiful career structure is misguided, and students are forced to make a life out of the subjects and topics which go over their heads.
Why Take a Gap Year?
To break the chain of receiving unnecessary suggestions and ideas about our career, the most innovative approach is taking a gap year and let all the thoughts and opinions of irrelevant persons rest in peace. The most important thing is to break the habit of agreeing to disagree. Students can have the much needed time to introspect themselves for their better future and put the focus and efforts in their point of interest.
Students can take a more mature decision and feel more motivated for the future after taking a gap year of thoughts under their belt. The pressure and stress levels lying in the high school students add as an essential factor for taking a gap year to let students refresh themselves and enjoy certain levels of solitude as well. The refreshment and solitude help students to prepare themselves for more essential and crucial chapters of life.
More and more counselors and psychologists are encouraging the gap-year option to take care of the mental and emotional health of students. Taking care of the suggestions of experienced doctors and counselors, the universities are launching the deferred enrollment options. These enrollment options are helping students to prepare better and earmark the journey with enhanced focus, motivation, and maturity.
How to Spend a Gap Year?
Counselors and universities have recognized that there are many pathways to college. Most of them are seeing a gap year as an opportunity for students, if properly vetted, to change their graph of life towards optimism and success.
To make use of the gap year properly, the students need to follow the things which promise them happiness, excitement, personal enrichment, and a lot of learnings. The experts hold a suggestion that most students enjoy personal enrichment through travel, service work, volunteering somewhere, or educational programs.
Most of the students need a structure and planning for a gap year. The reason for a structure and planning is many students fail big in the midway. The main idea of taking a gap year is to learn about yourselves, and if the sole purpose goes in vain, then it might result in procrastination, demotivation, and depression as well. Therefore, the primary entity of taking a gap year should be preparing a foolproof plan and structure well in advance.
A student should be of the ideology of making the best use of the gap year and can combine the following options for the gap year:
Work
A Gap Year can be utilized to work at the point of our interest and load up the C.V with all the essential and topmost credentials, which may help to impress the interviewing panel in your Dream University or college for graduation.
Travel
Traveling is just like therapy. The therapy that helps to learn as we enjoy and introspect deep within ourselves. Traveling helps to open up new experiences and new perspectives, and it enables you to gain independence as you learn to cope in an unfamiliar environment. If you are lucky enough, you may meet new people with a new ideology that can affect the prospects of your career in a positive manner.
Volunteer
Volunteering can be the much-needed cherry on top of the cake. The experience we gain while volunteering helps to gain work experience, learn about community living, and also helps to learn about how to judge the emotions of other individuals. Working towards the cause of our interest puts a positive and long-lasting impact on the resume.
Get a College Credit
If you are not burned out with the high-stress level studies in high school, then you can consider taking a course or two at your local college community. Taking a session helps to get into the habit of taking college classes without having a massive load right from the beginning.
Have an Introspection Period
The introspection period is as crucial as giving determined and focused years of learning in graduation. The introspection period helps to understand and nurture the career goal that we ought to achieve in the long term. The clarity that you will make after the introspection, it can translate into a smoother experience and puts you on the right path for fruitful graduation.
Are There Any Cons of Taking a Gap Year?
A Gap Year is an amazing and a worth-while experience for the students. But, the universal truth is everything has two faces to it. Everything in the universe is having both pros and cons attached to it. Though the Gap Year is considered to have more pros than cons, still many cons are present in taking a gap year, which the students need to figure out well.
A few cons of taking a gap year and working on ourselves for a full year are as follows:
- Gap years can be expensive and have harsh impacts on our pockets and daily expenses.
- You might lose momentum and land in a state of procrastination.
- You may fall behind and lose touch with friends.
- Relatives and friends might have a false image and view built in their minds.
But, the gap year will be a worthwhile, adventurous, and happy experience with tons of memories built for your future. The learnings in a gap year will be useful for the whole life and help achieve unrecognized and undesired much-required goals in the journey. The graph of positivity and productivity would see a drastic spike helping us make more mature and motivation driven decisions.
The love of learning, which was long lost under the stress levels in high school and irrelevant suggestions of friends and family, would see a U-turn. You would be inclined towards learning new and exciting things more effectively and efficiently.
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