Taking a Year Off Before College?

An anonymous reader asks: "I am a high school senior this year and I have been considering a year off before college. Is this a wise move? If you took a year off, were you still able to get into the school you wanted? I have been asking around and everyone tells me it is a horrible move; however, the people who say this are the ones who did not take a year off."

Comments

Don't take a year off now.

[Utopia]

Otherwise everybody starting from your future college to your employer will question about the gap in your education.
Take a year off after you complete your education if you want to.

Re:Don't take a year off now.

[Incongruity]

everybody starting from your future college to your employer will question about the gap in your education.

Why is that a problem? If one can answer that question well, it will distinguish them from their peers. Don't be a sheeple. If you can (reasonably) explain and justify what you do, then it's probably a good idea, even if it is the lesser followed path...note though, that one may go with the group while not following the group...so if it makes sense to go the same course as many others, do it...if your sense of things tells you to do something different than most, do it. If you simply fear the questioning that will come from not doing something different from the norm, then you're not doing the right thing for you.

Re:Don't take a year off now.

[geoswan]

Otherwise everybody starting from your future college to your employer will question about the gap in your education.

School is expensive though. Even if you are going to a University with a modest tuition there is still residence, or reasonable equivalent. Who would be pushy if you say you needed to take time to earn money to afford school? Even if your family is rolling in dough your parents might believe it is "character-building" to make you pay your own way.

If you are not planning to work -- somehow you have the dough to travel around the world, or try to put together an album, or something, my advice would be to keep a journal, a disciplined one. Summarize it. Take pictures. If you paint pictures, include colour photo-copies. If you read serious books, review them, keep a reading log, write down what you learned from them, what questions you had.

Serious volunteering, at a food bank, homeless shelter, women's shelter. These could be really illuminating experiences. Experiences that could answer the criticism that your year off was a holiday, a waste of time. Particularly if you do some homework, do some reading, do some writing, about what the experience meant to you.

When I was a youngster I knew a smart gal who wasn't sure what she wanted to do with her life. So she approached a bunch of people she respected, and asked them, if they could only recommend one book, what would it be? Then she read them -- even if they weren't things she would ever have considered. (Her list only had one duplicate -- Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib".)

As for approaching your first year -- I have some advice there too. I was a teaching assistant. Most of my students had a much higher average coming from high school than I had -- around 95%. A fair number of them had the misfortune of being head and shoulders the smartest kids in their class. Misfortune? Yup. Some students are so obviously bright that they get breaks. They get to coast. High school isn't enough of a challenge for them. They get to slack off, and not do their homework. Maybe their teachers overlooked lapses on their part, because they felt it reflected poorly on themselves? Whatever.

Coming to a large University was a big adjustment for them. Unfortunately, at a big University, your teachers don't know your rep, and everyone else had also been the smartest kind in their class. It seemed to me that less brilliant, less articulate students, students who couldn't coast, came to University already used to giving their education a fuller effort.

If you are used to coasting in high school taking a year off, meeting some real people, sounds like a good idea. Take the advice someone else offered, and take a couple of college night courses. It will help you determine if you really are prepared.

There have been other, longer, discussions here this year that have addressed this issue. They are worth looking for.

Some of those comments from earlier discussions addressed how much room a young person should allow for falling in love. Don't let falling in love interfere with graduating. But college will be the last time in your life when you are surrounded by trim, fit, attractive, single people. As you get older you will probably find your standards of fitness and attractiveness will relax. But singleness will remain important. After you graduate, you will enter a world where you will be much less sure that the people you meet are single.

In high school, and university, you may know people who have been "going steady" since grade nine. But a lot of them are basically stil single too. Even if they seem happy, if they don't have shared debt, children, or tangible property, like a house or a car, maybe they are still relatively single?

If you are still in high school now is the time to have your first love -- and likely your first romantic disappointment. Whatever you do, don't put it off until after you graduate. Your first romantic disappointment? A lot of people don't cope well with that. They do wild things, like blow all their dough, or mope around. If you are still living at home, in a loving household, your parents won't let your moping grow too destructive. And if you blow all your money, it is only your allowance, or your income from your part-time job. Your parent will still feed you. If you feel compelled to blow all your dough when you already have a mortgage, you can do yourself far more damage. You can run through your retirement savings. You can put your children's nutrition at risk. So budget time for being open to love now.

One more peice of advice. If you haven't read Richard Feynman's "Surely you are joking Mr Feynman", go read it. I particularly recommend the chapter he devoted to the sabbatical he took in Brazil, and the conclusions he reached about how science education can go wrong.

A professor's perspective....

[philosophyandrew]

The central question is: are you ready to go to college next year or not? If you are not ready -- because you don't realy want to go, because you don't have the academic skills or motivation necessary to do well, etc. -- then the worst thing to do is to go. In that case, you waste time and money and squander the precious opportunity to secure strong educational outcomes for yourself.

So, from my perspective as a college teacher the opportunity to do it right is too precious to waste. As long as you use your time off to become better prepared to succeed, to get a clearer sense of why you want to go to college and want you want to achieve, or to have interesting and enriching life experiences then educationally taking a year off is well worth it, and it will be recognized as such by nearly anyone within higher education.

One of the other things to consider

[mhesseltine]

My understanding is that, most of the time, if you are a college student full time, you can stay on your parent's insurance program. Depending on your work/living situation, this may be beneficial.

Probably not a good idea

[ctr2sprt]

I didn't take a year off, but I knew many people who did. They, and I, recommend against it. There's nothing wrong with it; you won't die or get rejected from everywhere. I don't think you'll even be less likely to get into a school, provided you can provide a better reason for taking a year off than "I didn't feel like going to college." If you do internships or other meaningful work, your chances of getting into a good school may improve.

But the real problem is making yourself limit it to just one year. Trust me, I've known too many people who meant to take off a year and then never went to college. Some of them will still be in their mid-20s, so they may go yet, but... frankly, if you're 25 and haven't gone to college, the odds are very much against ever going. And if you do go, you're going to be older than most of the seniors. That may not affect your social life, if you're outgoing and make friends easily. But if you're a little shy already, being older than everyone else may serve to make you feel even more different.

My other problem with taking a year off is that people usually do it for really bad reasons. I can't tell you how many people I've known who wanted to take a year off because they didn't know what they wanted to do. Guess what? Nobody knows what he wants to do at 18. (Well, some people do, but they're definitely the minority.) Even at college, this is true. Most people end up at college because they don't know what they want to do. It's another four years for you to try to figure it out. At most schools, you don't need to declare your major until your sophomore or junior year, and at mine, you could change your major at any time (provided it would still be possible for you to get enough credits in 5 years total).

Really, the only people I know who've been happy about taking time off from - and generally not going to - college are those who already know what they want to do. People who are going to work in the family business, start their own, things like that. Everyone else, without exception, has spoken to me of regretting taking the time off. "Man, I wish I'd gone to college... now I'm stuck in this dead-end job that I hate, and I've got too many bills to pay to quit and go to college."

Of course, your mileage may vary, but you should think long and hard about why you are taking time off.