The Best Time To Take a Gap Year Might Be Now
Why the pandemic might be the best time to take a break and prepare yourself for your future.
Class of 2020, I’m so sorry. I know it sucks to see your future go from within your grasp to vanish in a long, painful blink of an eye. My plans for the future, like yours, might have been derailed indefinitely. I’ve given myself a couple of months to mourn the loss of what might have been but ultimately I would like to embrace this once in a lifetime opportunity to take a gap year. If not in 2020 in the middle of a pandemic, when?
Why a gap year
I posed the question to my Twitter several months ago while applying for a Master’s degree because I was feeling burned out from the application process & the pressure of the final semesters of engineering. The best advice centered on finding what I wanted to do, take a break to travel/ take time out for my mental health, work on passion projects, study for competitive qualifying exams, or sit back and read without the pressure of forced productivity getting in your way.
This year especially, with lots of well-laid plans displaced, you might as well enthusiastically (or resignedly, who am I to dictate what you feel) officially take on a gap year. Or a gap 6 months.
- There’s nothing lost in the process, not this year when the Class of 2020 hasn’t officially even graduated in most cases. There’s no normalcy anymore, so having the pandemic & associated hiring freezes as a break in your CV might not raise any eyebrows in the future.
- This is one of the only opportunities you, as an Indian graduate, can take a break in a socially acceptable manner, and won’t be considered a failure for staying in and doing some things you enjoy for a change. A gap year is still taboo in society, but this year might change that for good.
- The pandemic and a sudden loss of “normalcy” has taken a toll on everybody. While forcing productivity might work for some, a bit of downtime and shifting focus to your mental health might be one of the best things you can do to prepare yourself for a future.
What are your options
Here are some of the options I got from Indians who took gap years previously- You can pick and choose what works for you!
- Dabble in your own field: You can find your niche within the subject you choose to pursue, find work, and/or courses to explore if you would like to take it up in the long haul! Our curriculum gives us very little breathing room and lots of outdated material to study, so to make a choice from that limited exposure is uninformed at best. If you feel so inclined, you can choose to learn more through remote internships/ freelance work and explore your subjects firsthand. Save up some money to be able to take breaks/ travel (someday, many months later).
- Work on passion projects: If you’ve had something you’ve wanted to work on for long and just needed time, this is it. You are likely to have swathes of time and not much to distract you- no Slack notifications from your employer, no assignment from college, nothing apart from the household work that you’ll have to do in the future as well. Use the boredom of every day and take some time to tackle the dreams that don’t quite fit into your grand plan.
- Study for a test: If you have a qualifying exam you’d need to take, this is the best time to work on it without overwhelming pressure from other sectors of your life.
- Read: As full-grown adults, it’s a great time to revisit your beliefs or do the background reading (or YouTube Explainers) to understand your world-view better. There’s enough material out there and being informed is a confidence boost & becomes apparent in how you present yourself. There are several forums online to be able to engage with your worldview better, politics & morality are not as simple as a newspaper headline. While our seniors may not have had the luxury of time to learn this, look at it as an introspection exercise which helps you learn more about yourself and the world you’re going to be a part of.
- Learn to Live Independently: Nothing in your life can prepare you for living alone but you can work to imbibe some skills that make a transition to a new city/ life easier for you. This might include working on a language, cooking, learning to plan finances, connecting with interesting people who might be part of your life in the future, etc.
- Get Mental Health support: While it may seem unconventional and despite loads of stigma that accompanies it, approaching mental health support groups &/or counseling (often subsidized for students) might be the best thing you can do for yourself at this time. Mental health support may be for people going through a tough time, with past baggage to sort through, for people living with chronic illnesses, for anyone going through a big transition or might be showing symptoms of some mental illness- basically, we could all do with some mental health support here and there in our lives. Several people who have taken mental health gap years have learned to live with themselves more synchronously & work with more focus on their needs.
- Volunteer: Some of the most consistent responses I received for gap years were to invest some time working on something bigger than yourself. I’ve been volunteering my time for education-centric NGOs for two years now and engaging in these are super- fulfilling. Especially if you feel like you’ve lost some purpose in your life, volunteering for a local organization might be something that helps you find perspective and engage you constructively. Not to mention it does good to the intended recipients.
Your gap year is meant for you to get a handle on yourself, to learn and understand what you care about. Maybe it’s a break to reconnect with your hobbies from your childhood (to me that’s writing & reading). You can choose to spend your time working your way through the Netflix catalog, but make sure that it’s a conscious choice and not because you’re avoiding dealing with some unresolved issues or work. This article highlights why laziness is not something you should take the blame for & how the myth perpetuates into making us feel guilty for taking any downtime.
Maybe one day, sooner than later we can also travel again, the staple diet and highlight of gap years worldwide.
You can connect with me or give me feedback on Twitter, Instagram, or on my website.
