Rather than go straight to college from high school, Jorge Delgado ’10 took a gap year, half of which he spent in Peru, and the other half of which he worked and interned in places as far-ranging as Baskin Robbins and ESPN.
“My travels just taught me that I wanted a really good education, and my time spent interning and working gave me a sense of wanting a future in a setting that I wanted to be in,” he said. “I wanted to love my school and my job.”
While many incoming college freshmen have just one summer to adjust between high school and college, students like Delgado who take gap years allow themselves more time to travel and learn.
In some cases, however, taking a gap year actually complicates the transition. Delgado explained that, after a year of essentially hanging out with adults, he was initially confused as to how to interact with peers.
“Socially, I had to get used to being in a social group of my peers instead of just being with adults, as I had been when I was with my family in Peru and when I was working,” he said. “Coming into freshman year, everybody was sort of in the same boat, but for me it was especially difficult. I had to consciously put more effort into it.”
Miles Tokunow ’10 explained that his gap year, which he spent volunteering in an orphanage in Panama and working in a diner in his hometown of Los Angeles, also affected his transition, as he had grown unaccustomed to academic life.
“Most freshmen just have a summer between high school and college, but I had spent a whole year working in an orphanage, hanging out with kids, coming up with after school-activities, or I was at a cashier or busing tables,” he said. “I wasn’t writing papers or studying, so that adjustment to academic life was a bit of a difficult challenge.”
Similarly, Adina Teibloom ’10, who spent her gap year in Israel studying traditional yeshiva, travelling and volunteering, explained that her initial academic adjustment to college was balanced out by some life skills that she picked up during the previous year.
“I think the gap year really prepared me for college in a way, because I had already figured out how to live on my own,” she said. “I had already dealt with the stress of living with a roommate and cooking for myself so, in a way, I came to college feeling like I only had to add one element to it—classes.”
Although Teibloom acknowledged that it was bizarre at times to feel older than her peers, she noted that the gap year helped make her transition to college life, in some respects, much smoother.
“In some ways, taking a gap year, especially in a country where I was already legal to drink, was important for me,” she said. “When I got to college, I didn’t have a crazy partying period because I had already done that, in a way.”
Teibloom also noted that her gap year transformed what she wanted to get out of college.
“My gap year just made me realize that I didn’t need to be the overachiever I had always been in high school,” she said. “I wanted to put a lot more stock in my extracurriculars, and I realized that it was the relationships I would make and the stuff I could say I did in college, rather than just the classes I took, that form such an important part of the college experience. I would never have realized that if I hadn’t been in a setting, like Israel, where I had no classes and no grades at all.”
Similarly, Tokunow explained that his gap year opened his eyes to a world outside of college and altered his approach to it.
“Although I can’t say that my gap year definitively prepared me for college, I think what it did was give me insight into the fact that there’s a world out there that I can survive in, which makes the thought of it much less scary,” he said. “It prepared me in thinking about that constant always outside of school.”
Echoing Tokunow’s sentiments, Delgado credited his gap year experience with shaping what he most values in life and in his future.
“I mean, when I was travelling, especially when I was in rural Peru, people there just had different priorities,” he said.
For Delgado, not only did his gap year affect his transition to college, but it also altered his entire outlook on life.
“I was on this small bus once, and I met this man who was freaking out because he was trying to get these giant tubs of milk to the market before they went bad, because he needed to sell them in order to make the money to feed his mother and sisters,” he said. “Up until then, I only worried about school and turning papers in late, and it just gave me a completely different world view about what matters in life, which is your family, your friends and what you really want out of life.”
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