High Tech Gap Year: A Dad’s Story

I’d like to say that parenting our three kids has been a 50:50 project. I’d love to say that. I’d love to believe it. But as in most marriages I know, despite everyone’s best intentions, mom almost always carried the bigger share of the attention, planning, and outright work of parenting. And despite the overall imbalance, I think everyone in our house would put me into the “he’s a really good dad” column. Yay! I drove. Read stories. Carried little people. Wrapped gifts. But all-in-all it was more mom than dad.

Years have gone by and our kids are older. In fact, they are all somewhere in the pipeline of launching out into the big wide world. Our youngest is in high school, our eldest is navigating a thoughtful and mature mid-stream college rethink, and our middle child is starting a gap year between high school and college.

Maybe it’s because my wife is feeling more and more “done” with raising kids. Maybe it’s the particular deficit of parental engagement I felt when I was readying to leave home. Whatever the reason, I decided to step up and take on the Gap Year as my own “dad takes the lead” parenting project.

This is the story of how I’m helping my son with what we hope will be a transformative and thoroughly useful 21st century high tech gap year.

A Gap Year? That’s what I wanted.

A few years ago, when I first heard the term “gap year” I wished that such a thing existed when I was college bound. I was UNREADY FOR COLLEGE. Profoundly so. More than disappointing my professors, or multiple episodes of nearly getting thrown out, I look back and think what an incredible mountain of missed opportunities it all was.

Underneath it all, I didn’t want college. Sure, I wanted to get out of the house, drink beer, meet girls, live the Animal-House male dream life, all that stuff of high school fantasies. However, at the root, it was simply about doing what everyone else was doing. Running with the herd. And what about actual, bona fide college level classes? Chemistry labs? Intro to Bio? Essays on the Book of Job? No. If I’m honest, I have to say that I didn’t in my heart desire those things. I wasn’t champing at the bit to master the telltale differences between Minoan and Mycenaean artworks. However, that was the price a person accepted to run with the herd and party with the cool kids. Yay college! Sign me up. I’ll write that paper on Job.

How many times have I wished I could go back and do it all differently? Dig in? Get the most out of it ? Truly, anyone who has worked in a demanding, high-stakes job knows that college is bounce house easy. If only I could go back and talk some sense to my younger self.

Matthew declares his Intent

Anyway. About a year and half ago, toward the end of his junior year, our son Matthew announced that he wanted to take a gap year before starting college. His rationale was reasonable. He wanted to focus on high school, improve his grades, spend more time figuring out where he wanted to go, and ultimately, just get “more ready for college”.

And you know what? Despite all of our awareness of the costs of being college unready, my wife and I were still not fully prepared for the news. Why? I think it was that we had mostly thought of the gap year as a sparkly abstract concept and how we might have benefited from one ourselves. (Oh, just a clarifying note here, my wife has also said many times that she would have loved to have done a gap year, but her mom wouldn’t let her). And now we were parents who were looking forward to a clear progression of kids moving out and downsizing our family footprint. More time for us! And suddenly one of them says, “Hey! I want to hang out for another year or so.”

We talked about it. Considered possibilities and programs. Went around and around until a clearer picture of how this might look took shape.

Requirements and a Proposal

Here’s where I finally came down on the whole thing:

1. A gap year is far far far better than a “failure to launch.” A year spent getting ready for college is definitely preferable to a kid coming back home after college and struggling to get on his or her feet. That whole failure to launch, boomerang kid thing is not where we want to end up.
2. Work. Stopping out of school and working for a year was the key for me in terms of salvaging my college experience. After a year of waiting tables I was 100% ready to finish my senior year strong. Work made me want it.
3. This isn’t an indulgence. If it looks like a vacation, it probably isn’t the next best thing you could do in terms of developing the habits and sense of commitment that will help you get the most of out college.
4. One year. At first Matthew wasn’t sure if it would be one year or two... Naw naw. Uh huh. Two was not ok. We all finally agreed on one year.

Together it looked like… get a head start on skills that could help with the eventual post-college transition to independence… get a taste of what real work is like… it can’t look like an extended vacation… and it’s over next fall. That’s what we put on the table.

What Matthew came up with:

• He got a nearly perfect GPA for his final year of high school
• He is currently working on his college applications
• And he is going to learn web programming
• After that he will get an internship or job where he can use his newly acquired programming skills

Great! Yay! Fireworks!

What about the “Tech” part of the Gap Year?

Here’s the deal on the tech part. We happen to live across the bay from San Francisco. Over there in The City are a bunch of companies experimenting with education: new tools, new formats, new business models. It’s a very exciting time. And through my work (I do consulting for software product teams) I had done some research into these firms and related tech trends. Matthew clued in on what I was doing and picked out a firm I had been looking at called General Assembly.

After checking out some alternatives, Matthew signed up for a Web Development Immersive program at General Assembly. We attended some info sessions to check them out and came away very impressed with their whole gig. Their culture is an excellent balance of friendly, hard working, plugged in, but not frantic-freaky.

The program is 40 hours per week for 12 weeks. Through individual and team projects students learn the latest skills required for developing web sites and the systems that power them. This is commonly referred to as full-stack development. At the end of the program the school helps students create a portfolio of work and make connections to land jobs and internships.

How about the Dad part of the Gap Year?

Now here’s the real kicker. I found the program so interesting… that I signed up for it too. That’s right. Father and son are going back to school.

My thinking:

• I’ll get to put in time with my son in a way we’ve never done before. For at least 40 hours per week, we’ll be navigating many of the details of modern life: commuting, prepping for work, solving problems, etc.
• Although I’ve been feeding software teams product requirements for over a decade, I haven’t written a line of code since high school (and not much then). I’ll be considerably more informed about what goes into products.
• Knowing the fundamentals of coding is becoming a baseline skill in high tech. If you don’t code, you’re a bit outside the tribe. One of them not us.
• Communicating product requirements used to be about writing long specification documents. No more. People want visual representations of what needs to be done. This program will give me skills to more effectively create interactive materials to share with engineers.
• We often need to test out product ideas with simple prototypes. Seeing how real users engage with these can hugely inform product plans. I’ll now be able to hack together rough prototypes without needing to lean on the development team.
• But mostly this is about linking arms with my son to get up to speed on some of the essential skills needed in the 21st century economy. A wise man once said, “As father and son we will rule the galaxy!” Right? Who was that?

The plan at this point is to take notes each week on the experience and share them here in case anyone is interested. I’m guessing that we might be the only father and son team in the world right now jumping into a web development immersive program. Perhaps we are making a little bit of history. If you are curious, check back and see what we run into.