I Took 2 Gap Years. Here are 14 Reasons It Changed My Life
Should you take a gap year? While the answer isn’t yes for everyone, if you’re thinking about it, I think you absolutely should.
It’s filled with upside, and in my experience, very little downside.
I took two gap years after high school and can say without a shadow of a doubt that it changed the trajectory of my life for the better in almost every way imaginable.
With each passing year, I see more and more good reasons to a take gap year.
On the flip side, I see fewer and fewer reasons to rush into school, especially if you’re not sure what you’re going to do. If you don’t either, I think that’s great. 18-year-olds shouldn’t have their life all figured out.
I truly believe that if you take a gap year and use the world as your sandbox, you won’t regret it. I think it can change your life. I think you can discover yourself, explore what interests grab you, travel, save money, volunteer, read a ton of books or so much more.
My reasons come mostly from my personal experience, and might not all apply to you. However, even if they don’t, I hope they can be an inspiring brainstorm for the wondrous and numerous benefits of taking a gap year.
Here are 14 reasons why you should take a gap year.
Some of these are obvious, and you’ve probably already thought of them. However, as someone who personally took two gap years after high school and before college, I can share additional reasons why I think it’s excellent.
Let’s start with the obvious reasons.
1) College Is Ridiculously Expensive, So Don’t Go If You’re Not Sure It’s For You
It’s likely not news to you that the price of college has skyrocketed in recent decades. In no other industry has the price risen so much, while the product stayed essentially the same.
As one example, a 2021 report by Georgetown University found that between 1980 and 2020, the average price of an undergraduate degree increased by 169%. That’s outrageous.
Speaking from personal experience, my school’s pre-aid price tag currently sits at an estimated $90,000 per year. And they put that price right on their website!
As it relates to you and deciding to take a gap year, my point is college is an even bigger financial decision ever. If going to college will mean going into debt, that’s not a decision to take lightly.
The conventional wisdom that you should just go at 18 mattered a lot less in 1990 when your parents went to school, because it was much more affordable back then.
A gap year gives you time to decide what program is for you and at what cost, or even if college is right for you at all.
Relatedly to the financial aspect, this brings us to our next point.
2) A Gap Year Gives You Time To Save
Most obviously, you can spend a gap year working in some capacity, saving money to pay for college. You’ve got a whole year to work. I’ll talk more later about what this looks like and why it can be powerful beyond the money you save. Even if you can pay for college and have a plan, you’ll be thankful for some extra cash. I didn’t have to eat ramen noodles at NYU, thanks to my savings accumulated during my gap years.
Your Family Also Has Time to Save
It’s not just you who has time to save. If your family is helping you out, it also gives them time. I know my parents and grandparents are happy I took gap years, partially because it also gave them an extra two years to save and help me pay for it.
Lets Your College Savings Compound
If you know how compounding interest works, then you’re familiar with various graphs that show how the bulk of the retirement savings come in the final years before you take it out. As the principal grows, each percentage point equals more money in your college savings accounts.
You’ll have to run the numbers for yourself, but it’s worth checking how much your account will just grow by waiting one or two extra years to touch it.
If you’re not familiar with compounding interest, this Futurama clip will give you a good idea.
More Time to Improve Your Application
A better SAT score, an extracurricular, or a better essay can be the difference between acceptance and rejection. However, it can also be the difference between getting a scholarship.
If you think of the time off as a chance to improve your application, look at it as studying to save yourself thousands.
In my gap years, I took three SAT subject tests, and I can’t know for sure, but my excellent scores on those, which I would’ve had without the gap year, may have tipped the scales for my NYU scholarship.
This brings me to my next point.
3) Increase Your Chances of Getting Into Schools. A Gap Year is a Hack For College Admittance
This is something nobody talks about, and I’ll give my personal story to explain this.
In my senior year of high school, like many seniors, I busted my ass studying for AP exams. By the time I graduated, I was a whizz in biology and chemistry.
That summer, AFTER graduating, I took the biology and chemistry SAT subject tests. Here’s why this is genius: nearly everybody else in that room was still in high school, and hadn’t taken AP Chemistry or AP Biology Yet. They were 17-year-old incoming seniors, naive to the challenges AP Chemistry had in store for them.
I hardly studied for both and got a near-perfect score (790 out of 800) on both. It felt like cheating, yet it was perfectly allowed. Nobody at college admissions cares that I took it after high school. All they saw was my excellent score.
The SAT Subject Tests are designed for students to take before taking the AP course. I reversed it.
(Oh, I also “cheated” even harder by taking the SAT subject test in Spanish, one week after returning home from Spain, where I spent the first half of the summer.)
I give this as just an example. My broader point is this:
You have an extra year to beef up your application, get into better schools, and get more money from those schools.
You could take more exams that you already know all the answers to like me. If you have a humdrum SAT score, dedicate some time to study and re-take it.
It’s not just about tests. Whatever you decide to do in your gap year can be used to your advantage on your application.
Colleges want interesting students.
Your gap year and what you do in it can be a great opportunity to showcase the unique ways you’ve grown and learned, and how you’ll be an asset to the university.
4) Deferment Carries Very Little Risk
I knew I wanted to take a gap year even while a high school senior, so I didn’t apply to schools. However in my first gap year I did, because I wasn’t sure I would take a second year. Ultimately, I decided to defer from NYU and take this extra year.
My deferment included my scholarships, my program, and everything else. There was essentially no downside.
You’re not actually burning the boats. So if you want, apply to schools, and then you can decide to defer later.
5) You Deserve a Break. Take It.
If you’re feeling frustrated, burnt out, or just freaking tired from school, it’s okay to take a break. If your parents are telling you you’re lazy for wanting to take time off, remind them that high school is more rigorous than it used to be.
I’m a believer that people aren’t inherently lazy, and most of us just need to find what we’re excited about. I also know the world is crazy and stressful and that doing inspiring work often means taking a step back from other things.
Your gap year can be packed with activities and things to do. Yet, you can also be the master of your own schedule. Do you want to take Fridays off? A month off? Freaking do it.
Our society, historically, is really bad at teaching us to manage stress and find a workflow that allows us to stay motivated without burning out.
By considering a gap year, you can tell society to go pound rocks, and allow yourself to relax, and better yet, be bored.
This boredom and time off, I believe, will give you the space you need to ponder on the path you want to take in life.
6) Learn The Value of Boredom and Self-Exploration
Many of humanity’s greatest minds have written about the importance of boredom on their thinking.
For some great examples, I love Maria Popova’s essay In Defense of Boredom. Personally, in my gap years, I found this to be a huge component because it allowed me to explore what I really was interested in.
For example, my love of writing emerged during my gap year, only with time with myself to think. Late in high school, I began to enjoy English class more and more, but it wasn’t until I had no assignments that I realized how important writing felt for my thinking.
I began to develop habits like morning journaling. I started this blog, which was originally only a fitness blog, because that’s what I was immersed in. (Yet, even in my oldest writings, I see hints at broader interests.)
I don’t think I’d be a writer if it weren’t for the boredom a gap year gave me.
The key, though for me, and I think for you, is to not allow the boredom to get filled with too much quick dopamine. Boredom only leads to self-exploration if you like inward as well as outward.
Go on walks. Grab a book on a topic you’re interested in, or binge a podcast. Sit with yourself and your own thoughts for a little while. See what comes up. Escape the rat race and competition of college admissions and “getting ahead.”
From this boredom, I think many variations on benefits which I’ll mention next emerge.
7) Gives You The Chance to “Test Drive” a Career
In high school, when people asked me what I wanted to do with my career (an annoying question) I told people I was interested in fitness, and wanted to be a personal trainer.
While the idea of studying something like exercise science seemed interesting, what seemed more interesting was actually training people.
Most careers you can test drive during a gap year. You can find an internship, talk to somebody who works in it, or better yet, just start to do it.
That’s what I did.
Two weeks after graduating high school I became a certified personal trainer. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to work at a gym, the same gym I had trained at for years.
This was an incredible experience on many fronts, much of which is beyond the scope of this article.
While I learned a lot, I also learned that in the long term, I didn’t want to be a personal trainer. Waking up at 4:30 to teach 5:30 classes was fine for two years, but it wasn’t my path in life.
I wouldn’t have known that without a gap year. In fact, I think it’s likely that if I’d gone to school right after high school, I would’ve studied exercise science, then graduated, became a personal trainer, then realized I didn’t want to train clients my whole life, and have to start from scratch.
A gap year is a great time to figure out what you don’t want to do.
You’ll only find out if you try.
8) Finally, Time to Travel
In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss wrote, “For all the important things in life, the timing always sucks.”
One of the areas where this is most obvious is with traveling. There’s always something to miss, an excuse to not go.
A gap year is an incredible time to travel, where the excuses run thin. You’re young with little responsibility. It’s unlikely you’ll ever have a better time. In my gap years, I traveled each year for 1-3 months.
I would not be fluent in Spanish if it weren’t for this, an experience I reflect on this essay on my first language immersion experience, How to Conquer Fear.
Yes, this has some financial costs, but there are lots of ways to travel and volunteer, or to make it less expensive, as I cover extensively in my article on what I call Urban Backpacking.
9) Create Your Own Real-World Education
Just because you won’t be in school, doesn’t mean education stops. In fact, I took my gap years as opportunities to create my own real-world education.
At the start of my first gap year, this meant taking courses on becoming a great personal trainer and strength.
It meant reading all the unread books I’d had on my shelf. For example, I read all of the Harry Potter books in both English and Spanish in succession. This alone helped improve my Spanish much more than any Spanish course of did (or ever could, given the way we teach Spanish in US schools.) This alone is a worthwhile use of a gap year, in my opinion.
Kevin Kelly the founder of Wired Magazine, would agree. He said in an interview with Tim Ferriss, “I did a sabbatical once where I just read books and it was like literally, it’s all I’m going to do. I’m going to get up in the morning and I’m going to read books and I’m not going to do anything else. And that was really different from my normal behavior, but incredibly powerful.”
For me, my real-world curriculum included taking online courses. I took some on coaching and training, some on accelerated learning. I listened to podcasts, taking extensive notes on all of them.
All of this will be much less expensive than college. For me, it provided an equally enriching educational experience.
Later, my real-world education evolved into hands-on and intimate learning. In the spring of my second gap year, when I already knew I was going to NYU, I did an internship with the Umass Lowell hockey team, spending 6 weeks living in Massachusetts. I even hired a writing coach, who I later interned for when I moved to New York. This internship completely changed the course of my life and career, and was the bedrock of almost all my professional opportunities in my three years in college.
The gap year gives you time to learn whatever you want.
10) Do Better In College Once You Get There
A fear I often hear from kids considering a gap year is that “they’ll get rusty.” They worry that if they get out of the rhythm of school, they won’t be able to go back to it.
I do not mean to diminish this fear for some people. Certainly, it can be a valid concern. However, I offer my experience as a counterpoint.
First, I never stopped learning and “studying,” as I just talked about. My education only took on different forms. There were times I was bored, yes, but never times when I was mindless, letting my brain slowly rot. I filled the time by exploring my natural interests and curiosities.
Second, I was emotionally and intellectually much more prepared to succeed in college. In fact, stepping into freshman seminars as a 20-year-old, just like stepping into the SAT Subject Test room as an 18-year-old, felt like an unfair advantage.
My experiences in a gap year had prepared me in intangible ways for school.
For example, I learned to wake up and set my own morning routine, ungoverned by the structure of school. This made it easy to schedule times for me to study, even if I didn’t have class. I was not the typical college student cramming on Sunday nights.
I had traveled and lived away from home, often sleeping in bunk beds (hostels), so the experience of a freshman dorm was not overwhelming, even in Lower Manhattan. Often these abroad experiences were much crazier than my NYU dorm. I had gotten drunk and stayed out too late, waking up to face the consequences of my actions before, so I skipped past the freshman-gets-too-drunk-too-often phase.
In sum, I had built life skills, good habits, and the necessary discipline AWAY from school. That way when I went to school, I was primed to succeed.
Second, my brain was just more mature. The difference between 18 and 20 is vast from a developmental perspective. The frontal lobe, the part of the brain that gives us higher reasoning and sound judgment, is the last to develop. I’m grateful my frontal lobe had reached the point where I could make some good decisions.
Being older is in my view just an advantage.
This may be more true now than it used to be. There’s compelling research suggesting that 18-year-olds are less emotionally prepared for adulthood than they used to be.
The title and subtitle of Jean Twenge’s book says it all: iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood — and What That Means for the Rest of Us
This is not good or bad, in my view, it’s simply a different reality. Research on childhood development has shown that kids have less sex, do less drugs, and work less than they used to. In essence, they’re growing up slower.
This is just all the more reason to wait a year or two.
11) Learn That Life Isn’t a Race, That It’s a Sandbox to Explore
When I took a gap year, I gained some objectivity on what things mattered and what things don’t. For example, as I personal trainer, I felt a higher stake in my work. Parents spent a good chunk of their hard-earned money to place their faith that I would help their teenager develop, not just as an athlete, but as a person.
That’s the real world, and I felt the stakes were much higher than my high school exams.
In school, you stress about things that literally don’t affect anybody else but yourself. In the “real world,” your consequences have actions, and this provides valuable lessons.
Through experiences like this, I came to see that school, and life, aren’t a race. No longer did I overly stress about test scores and grades. This doesn’t mean I didn’t care about this, but I placed them into a broader context of life.
When I went to NYU, I saw it as a sandbox to explore different ideas. I took risks in what classes I took, what topics I wrote about, and what extracurricular activities I did. Because I knew this was the time when I could take risks without much consequence.
12) Learn The Importance of Interdisciplinary Thinking
When choosing what to study in college, and in the frame of mind, you’re often confined to one broad subject. However, the real world is not one subject. It’s the interconnectedness of an unlimited amount of infinitely complex systems, which we sum up by calling life.
Gap years mimic life much more than school does. Traveling is not just about traveling. For me it was about language learning, understanding how different cultures think, what it meant to live in a city for the first time, and more. Personal training was about more than anatomy, it was also about how to coach, give cues, and market myself verbally and in the written word.
In my gap years, I learned the importance of interdisciplinary thinking.
This realization impacted me so much that I wound up going to The Gallatin School of Individualized Study, a program entrenched in viewing learning through a connected lens.
I wouldn’t have studied this if it weren’t for my gap year experiences.
13) Deepen Relationships With Family Members
As a senior in high school, I read an essay that made my decision to take a gap year suddenly obvious. It’s called The Tail End by Tim Urban.
It’s an incredible essay that uses the power of visuals to place into context and specifically show short life is.
Toward the end of the article, he gives a graph that shows just how little time left he has with his parents. He writes, “It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.”
This hit me, because I spent much of my high school years brooding and avoiding having a relationship with my parents. I was cold and closed off, like most teenage boys. Yet, a part of me knew I wanted to spend more time with them, to get to know them more and feel connected to them.
Taking a gap year, where I would live with my parents the majority of the time, was the chance to extend this quality time I had with them.
Today, I’m closer to them than I ever have been, and I credit our numerous dinners where we talked about life, work, politics, and more. At 18 and 19, they treated me like a fellow adult at the table.
14) An Opportunity to Find Meaning
I don’t mean this in the sense that a gap year will give you the secrets to the meaning of life. However if that’s what you’re searching for, a gap year is a great time to investigate.
During my gap years, I was able to reflect on what I actually cared about. What was important to me? What gave me meaning? Before this time, I had put little thought to it.
I discovered some core experiences that I learned make me happy. For example, I drove hours to go to punk shows for the first time and learned how much they filled up my soul. I discovered my love for language learning and playing with language. I developed a writing practice which is now the core of my identity.
I didn’t discover the meaning of life, but I discovered some of the ways life makes me happy. This, at its core, is what I hope you discover too, wherever your gap year takes you.
Let Me Know What You Do and Why
A lot of these reasons are me projecting my own experience on the benefits of my gap year onto you.
I suspect that when you take a gap year, you’ll have 2-3 reasons in common, and 10-15 of your own reasons for its benefits.
View these not as dogma or prescription for the benefits of a gap year, rather, view it as a brainstorm for the possibilities.
Whether you work, spend the whole year reading, jet off to a faraway place, or serve your community, the possibilities for a gap year are endless because they reflect the possibilities that life itself has to offer.
If you enjoyed this and found it inspiring in some way, I’d love to present to you with a journal prompt to continue the brainstorm on your own.
Imagine you’re eating lunch with yourself 5 years from now, just graduating college. You’re asking them about their college and gap year experience. What do you think they will share with you? What are they interested in? What have they learned?
4 Comments