You may want to take a gap year, but worry that while you’re away from your regular studies you might lose your edge. If you’re away from school for long enough, perhaps you’ll need so much time to get back into the educational groove that you’ll fall behind. But there may be a way around this, by engaging in some sort of study while you’re taking the year off. You can feed your soul, learning things that focus on your own interests and desires, yet be fully ready to be a formal student again once you return home.
There are multitudes of possibilities, some of them involving volunteer programs in which to participate. For example, if you’re interested in working with animals, then you could spend a few months at a koala sanctuary in Brisbane, Australia. Then you might fly over to Thailand to help with an aid organization. Or perhaps you’d prefer to enroll in a short art and design program in Ghana, or further your art studies in Italy. Many of the gap year websites like www.gapyear.com have links to programs like these. Some also include discussion forums where people post information about these opportunities while others share tips and information from experiences they’ve already gained from their own gap year travel and work.
Once you decide on the direction you want to take, whether it’s explicit courses of study or volunteering, you’ll need to investigate the programs you find in your research. First of all, you might need a few extra qualifications. For example, some animal work requires certain types of training, while some is more “grunt work” and the learning is all on the job. You’ll also need to check the track record of the organizations themselves that offer these gap work jobs. This is when communication with previous high school graduates who have opted for these programs is invaluable.
You may decide to study the Mandarin language in China, take art courses in Italy, or volunteer in Africa. With the wide range of educational opportunities that are open to you during your gap year, you don’t have to worry that you’re going to lose your mental edge. While you are learning things that feed your soul and engage your greatest interests, you will be keeping your mind active, so that you can return to your regular studies without having lost a single step.
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