After being rejected from the art studio major at the end of her sophomore year, Sasha Portis ’09 felt she needed to take a break, even if that meant possibly not coming back.
“I was floundering around, not knowing what I was doing, not getting great grades except for in art classes, so I decided to take time off and either come back or not,” she said. “A lot of people worry that if they take time off they won’t come back. But I say, if you don’t want to come back you don’t have to come back.”
Like Portis, many students are taking advantage of the flexibility the University allows to take a semester—or even a year—off.
For Portis, the option to leave was not so much about what she would do but about the fact that she chose to do it. She explained that taking a year off to work and to travel was the first big decision that she had ever made in her life.
“Going to college is something you’re supposed to do,” she said. “Taking time is not something you’re supposed to do.”
Portis spent the first few months at home in Los Angeles, where she worked for a political environmental campaign, even though she wasn’t specifically interested in politics. There she met such high-profile politicians as Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and Al Gore.
“I held the door open for [Obama],” she said.
Portis also spent several months traveling through Europe and Morocco, where she was particularly excited to have the chance to hitchhike.
“When I went to Europe, I didn’t have a plan, but I had friends to stay with and train tickets were cheap,” she said. “[Hitchhiking] is socially acceptable. I didn’t do it alone, but I felt completely safe.”
Of her time away from Middletown, Portis found her time in New Orleans the most powerful.
“I learned a lot about white privilege, college, opportunity,” she said. “I realized that even though college has its flaws I need to take it seriously. I learned that this is not how college is everywhere.”
Returning to campus this year, Portis’ doubts about her decision to come here—she had contemplated going to art school and also taking a gap year—largely dissipated. She has a renewed appreciation for the libraries and the lectures that the University offers.
“All that free shit I take advantage of now,” she said. “Before I took classes based on what I thought an East Coast, American education should be. Now I’m taking classes where people are questioning things and are not just feeding you something.”
Whether traveling abroad or staying in the United States, time spent away from college can allow students the chance to step out of their comfort zones.
Alexis Krisel ’09 decided to take time off after the University lost his application to study abroad in Australia.
“They didn’t tell me until it was too late,” he said. “I was so upset there was no way I could be here.”
Although he has family in New York, living at home was not an option, so Krisel had to look for work to get an apartment. He decided to realize his dreams of working in a restaurant kitchen, starting off the summer in the high-class, high-stress environment of La Esquina in Manhattan, where he worked the prep line.
“My knife skills just went beyond,” he said.
Soon, however, he found a job he liked better, and one that gave him more flexibility, at Georgia’s Eastside BBQ.
“I was walking by and saw that it had just opened,” Krisel said. “I told the owner I worked at La Esquina, and he offered me a job on the spot. The pace [at Georgia’s] was much better, but the executive chef sucked. He was a big, fat guy, and he couldn’t deal with raw meat. I was like, dude, this is a barbeque restaurant.”
The executive chef at Georgia’s quit after their first busy night. Krisel single-handedly kept the kitchen afloat. Soon after, he got offered the position of executive chef.
“My boss, who was high as a kite, walked up to me at the end of the night and said, ’How would you like to make 700 dollars a week and be my executive chef?’” he said. “I was like, ’Okay.’”
Being the executive chef at Georgia’s was physically demanding but professionally rewarding for Krisel. He arrived at the restaurant every morning between seven or eight a.m. and would stay until one a.m.
“I work best under pressure,” he said.
Still, the menu at Georgia’s was small enough that Krisel could improvise daily specials. While he was cooking there, the restaurant was reviewed favorably by The New York Times, The New York Post, and Time Out New York.
Although Krisel plans to go to culinary school, he came back to the University because of pressure from his parents and because he recognized the importance of having a B.A. from a place like Wesleyan.
Still, he highly recommended that students take time off.
“Especially if you think you’re not that excited to be at Wesleyan,” he said. “Think again, because transferring may not be the best thing to do either. It doesn’t matter when you graduate. [Taking time off] gives you an idea of what’s going on after. You get to take a break from school and come back and be infatuated with it but know that life after college is so cool.”
The experience also gave Krisel skills that he can use in the real world.
“I know how to flambé,” he said. “Flambé impresses people. And even if it’s not intentional just act like you meant to do it.”
The opportunity to gain skills not taught in classes at Wesleyan also allured Sara Swetzoff ’09 to take time off.
Although Arabic is offered at the University, Swetzoff attended Arabic language classes in Tunisia the summer after her sophomore year, seeking the total immersion experience that is sometimes lacking in study abroad programs. She loved the culture so much that she decided to stay for two years.
“I wanted to pursue Arabic,” she said. “But I think I stayed for so long because I really loved the people. I found some kind of passion and love for both individuals that I met, families that I lived with.”
Swetzoff became particularly interested in the way that Islam influenced the culture.
“People have this kind of vibe, hospitality—when I talked to people about it a lot of times they emphasized Islam. [In Arabic culture] it’s like the home is this little paradise, everything outside is kind of unclean but the home has the strongest cultural ideals,” she said. “The social transition [back to Wesleyan] was difficult because I was used to being entwined with a family more than I ever had been in my life.”
After Wesleyan, Swetzoff hopes to get her Master’s degree in Islamic studies. She feels that the lack of connection between contemporary Arabic culture and the American world is detrimental to both sides, and hopes to remedy this situation in part by translating classical and contemporary Arabic texts into English.
“[In America there is] not really any accurate idea of what life looks like and feels like there,” she said. “I think that’s a problem because if you can’t imagine it and it’s a huge unknown than that unknown can become anything.”
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