…but you don’t need to go straight to university either. What you need to do is get on with the next year of your life.
An article in the Daily Telegraph today entitled “Bridging the work experience gap” got me thinking about my attitude to gap years. After college (study at 16-18, for my international readers) I intended to take a gap year, which soon turned into two. By “take a gap year”, what I mean is I went to Vietnam for three months as a volunteer with the environmental NGO Frontier, doing environmental work. My plan for the remaining nine months was to stay at home with my parents and have semi-regular work that would keep me in cider until I went to university, after which my student loan would be keeping me in cider (I was a late convert to beer).
However, I ended up getting a year-long contract as a chemistry analyst in a water company laboratory. I only applied on the off-chance, it being the only job in the New Scientist that didn’t require a degree. Somehow I got it, so I moved away from home and UEA kindly allowed me to defer taking up my place for another year. It was awesome, and actually far more formative than my time abroad. I moved in to a shared house in a new town, and started earning money and paying rent for the first time.
Was this a gap (two-)year? It started out like that, with the standard extended overseas trip and an assured place at university. Or was it just the next two years of my life, which happened not to be in formal education? The idea of a gap-year implies that spending your entire time in formal education is the natural order of things and that doing something else, however positive, is a “gap” in the fabric of what you should be doing. I don’t agree with this. University isn’t for everybody, and university straight after college certainly isn’t. I am a university person so I went to university. But I am also someone who needs variety, so a two-year breather from formal education was just what I needed. Some people should go straight to university, some never. There are plenty of options, like delaying university, or studying part-time (the Open University is the biggest university in the UK!), or getting a job, or whatever.
So, don’t take a gap year, but do get on with the next year of your life. Make it a good one.
[...] job – chemistry analyst for a water company – I applied for almost on a whim. I had taken a year out before university and was doing casual work to keep me in beer. I saw the job advertised in the New [...]