There’s something powerful about being able to choose your path in life. If there’s ever been a time of life to really go out and take new risks, it’s when you’re a student. You don’t want to wait until you have a family to take care of — if you have a chance to go out and see the world, you might want to do it as a student.
However, there’s one problem: there’s usually college in the way. If you just graduated high school, then you might have the chance to go off to another country for a year and soak up the language as well as do something interesting, like teach English to students just like yourself.
It doesn’t have to be this way — you won’t have to give up what you really want to do just because it’s not the traditional way of getting things done. There are numerous benefits to taking a year off school and exploring a new path. For starters, it gives you experience that you might not have been able to get on your own. You will need to keep this in mind, especially if you have to go and tell your parents about your decision. They will want to know why you’re pausing school to do this, and you will need to be able to tell them something good.
It’s a good time to do a “gap year”, because colleges and universities are constantly asking students to differentiate, to show them that there’s something more to their backgrounds than the usual extracurricular and volunteer service. Taking off a y ear to help orphans in Africa or volunteer on a farm in Thailand is definitely something that doesn’t happen often, and it would show colleges that you are someone that definitely has a lot to offer their school.
There are a few things that you will want to do in order to really make the most out of a gap year, from a travel perspective.
The biggest thing that you can do at the beginning is to make sure that you have properly thought about all of the logistics as much as possible. You will need to think about where you will stay, what country appeals to you, the challenge of learning the language, and everything else involved. You don’t want to just think that you will have no problem getting things done and then run into a lot of snags at the lest minute that will delay you.
For example, you will need to make sure that you have any vaccinations done before you enter a developing nation to do service work. In fact, organizations that handle these relief missions will make sure that you understand this up front, as well as the need to have your passport and/or apply for a visa. If you don’t have these things done up front, you won’t be able to accomplish your own personal mission.
Money is something that can be negotiated, or sponsored. You shouldn’t let money keep you from traveling the world, because it’s possible to do on very little money. A lot of people think that it’s impossible, but there are plenty of students just like you that are going from one country to another.
Speaking of going from one country to another, the best way to accomplish this is to make sure that you are actually picking a country that is set against other countries naturally. This is why a lot of people like going to Europe, because you can easily get from one country to another.
Overall, taking off a gap year is a smart idea, but it only works out if you make it work out. If you choose not to make the most of it, you won’t have a great experience to share when you go back to college. What choice will you make?