You don’t need to take a gap year…

…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.

Take a deep breath…

I have taken a plunge, which in reality is barely a plunge at all.  Until last week I worked full-time, Monday-Friday.  For a year or so I felt that this was preventing me from going out and exploring other opportunities, money-making or not.  Finally, I decided to take decisive action!  Did I go freelance?  Did I set up my own company?  No and twice no.  Instead, I cut my hours to a four-day week!

In the big scheme of things, this is nothing.  A friend of mine runs a venture capital-funded internet start-up business; another just seems to manage to float from job to job, always landing on her feet.  Me, I’m generally quite risk averse, and appreciate the comfort of a regular salary.  So to give up about a fifth of my earnings feels like a much bigger wrench than it actually is.  All I will have to do is keep more track of my beer and discretionary spending money.

Last week was actually my first four-day week, although I didn’t find that out until Tuesday, having already taken the Monday off to attend a day of mentor training (more of which in a later post).  However, from this week my default working week will be Mon-Tue and Thur-Fri at the salaried coalface, with Wednesdays free for whatever current scheme I have going.  I made a conscious decision to make my non-salary day (not my day-off!!) a mid-week day – if it had been Monday or Friday the would be too much temptation to make it an extension of my weekend.

What will I be doing with my non-salary day?  I will be pursuing some freelance work, although I don’t expect this to make up much of the salary I am foregoing.  The point is more for it to be an exercise in developing and selling my skills.  I will also be spending some time researching some stuff that I have been interested in for a while, but haven’t had the time to do anything about.  A long way down the line this may or may not lead to gainful employment.  This week, I shall be attending Birmingham C21st Innovation Showcase, about local tech start-ups.  I don’t have an invention up my sleeve, but hopefully it will be food for thought.