The Case For Taking A Gap Year

Rye Magazine|Issue 61

ACADEMIC BURNOUT is a growing issue for students across the U.S. Far from being “the best years of our lives,” most will recount that high school was like living on a conveyor belt of SAT tests, extracurriculars, and self-doubts while under extreme pressure to rack up achievements that might help you to stand out from the crowd. Students graduate with a sigh of relief, hopefully anticipating a future full of opportunities, only to be body-slammed by another four years of even more intense academic pressure. Some students roll with the punches and learn to juggle essays and schedules and “adulting,” but a growing number are being leftbehind.

- Ethan Knight

Anxiety, depression, and even suicide rates skyrocket for US and Canadian teens in their first year of university (www. macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/the-mental-health-crisis-oncampus/). Launching from a high-pressure high school directly into higher-pressure university is proving increasingly difficult for some young people to handle successfully.

But of course, how could a young person ever hope to be successful at life and academia when they haven’t taken the time to decide what ‘success’ looks like to them? Absent self-awareness to inform their choices and life-experience to demonstrate their own particular genius, perhaps the answer to this growing crisis is simple: take some time off, already! Who says that education can’t continue outside of a classroom? Do we really need to immediately follow up the four-years and four-walls of high school with four more years of university? The statistics suggest that we shouldn’t. At our current rate, 53% of university students still have not completed their Bachelors Degree within six years, meaning there’s work to be done. (www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/upshot/why-collegestudents-drop-out-follow-the-dollars.html) As a way of combating this issue, many universities are beginning to encourage their applicants to take a Gap Year before arrival, citing the many academic and personal benefits that Gap Year alumni possess when entering academia.

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Denne historien er fra Issue 61-utgaven av Rye Magazine.

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I AM KNEELING in damp grass marveling at an anachronism in the world of Ubers and Waze: a sandstone marker about two feet high, handcarved with an old fashioned “24 M…” and missing its remaining “iles to New York.” It is mortared into a long wall and looks out on US 1 like some Knight Templar of American history. In the 1800s, this is how you might have found “the old Jay place” in Rye. Even with its inscription fragmented, it conjures visions of mail carriers on horseback, with dirt-streaked, buckled shoes wedged into stirrups looking for a familiar guidepost to tell them the distance to their secret assignation or a good beer down the road.