LEAPNOW Gap Year Resources:
Working with an artist in Bali, Indonesia
What IS a GAP YEAR? One definition is "a post-high school year of self-exploration and personal growth that leads to clearer direction and motivation for your life and for college study. A Gap Year may include travel, cultural immersion, directed study, service or conservation projects, internship opportunities, work and more." A Gap Year is a chance for you to direct your own learning, and align with yourself before doing more traditional classroom education. It is also a chance to fill in the gaps that are created in us by spending 12 years of our lives learning less than actively in a classroom. Some of these gaps include:
- losing touch with our physical body;
- thinking that education is something that is done TO us, rather than something that we direct ourselves and that comes through us;
- losing touch with the joy inherent in learning;
- losing touch with a sense of life purpose or relevance;
- forgetting that we can determine our own best learning environment;
- forgetting that we are capable, or never learning that we have tremendous gifts to offer the world.
LEAPNOW offers substantial resources toward creating an incredible year of "out-of-the-box learning:
| GAP YEAR
ARTICLES in the LEAPNOW BLOG: What is a Gap Year? Why take a Gap Year? How to Set up your own Gap Year |
A broad spectrum of gap year programs to choose from: LEAPYEAR: 8 months of accredited travel/study/retreats One Revolution: 4.5 months - 4 countries - Be the Change Learn To Serve: Service & Spirituality in north India - 3 months Supported Internship: Choose from 6,000+ opportunities in 126 countries |
| Monthly Gap Year &
Alternative College Workshops in the Bay Area:
2012: Saturday, March 10 April & beyond: TBD |
Gap Year Fairs In the bay
area: March 1, 2012 Drake High School, San Rafael, CA March 2, 2012 Los Altos High School, Los Altos, CA March 4, 2012 Jewish Community HS, San Fran., CA
|
| Click here for details about fairs and | workshops in the Bay Area and throughout the U.S. |
Students in the UK, Australia, and Canada commonly take time off between high school and college to gain real-life experience through travel, language immersion, community service and conservation programs, outdoor adventure, and professional internships. After completing high school there is a natural "gap" that a young adult can take advantage of - though a gap year or semester can occur at any point during your educational process (which ideally last as long as your lifetime!) Students in the U.S. are beginning to understand the value of taking time "on" before continuing on with college. To read one student's gap year experience, visit this article in Lamorinda Weekly.
As Gwyeth T. Smith Jr. puts it in this article in the Washington Post:
"Parents of high school seniors across
the country have hired me as an admissions consultant. They want
assurances that their children will be attending top colleges a
year from now.
Again and again, I say: "I hope not."
To their surprise, I explain that I'd rather see most of these young men and women far from a campus for a while. I urge them to bus tables in a restaurant, apprentice for an architect or pull weeds on a community farm. In their free time, I add, they should devour a stack of great books."
Gap Year Programs with LEAPNOW
LEAPNOW offers four distinct programs that can be used as a full or partial Gap Year:
- LEAPYEAR, which
starts in January or September,
is designed as the ideal Gap Year, and offers guided and solo
travel, structured and unstructured experience, inner and outer
exploration, and a full curriculum to help you know yourself
deeply. Perhaps best of all is the fact that you
receive a full year of college credit through Antioch University
Seattle - allowing you to take
time "on" without having to take time "off." A
further year of unlimited internships is built into LEAPYEAR
with access to our full database of 6,000+ options in 126
countries.
- Learn to Serve: India is a guided Spring or Fall semester focused on service in India's City of Light, Varanasi on the sacred Ganges River. In addition to serving and reflecting on service, students have the opportunity to study Hindi, live with Indian families, and take classes in crafts, dance, cooking, and more. Learn to Serve: India is a great pairing with One Revolution or a Supported Internship, and can also be used as a precursor to the LEAPYEAR program.
- One Revolution is a perfect way to start a Gap Year, and it can also be combined with a Supported Internship to create a full gap year. It lasts four and a half months, and takes you on a guided trip round the Earth - visiting Latin America, Asia and Africa. In each location we visit and work with projects that teach you the skills needed to "be the change" including: permaculture, green building, alternative forms of education, direct ecological action, reforestation, social justice, sustainable community, free trade and more. College credit is available.
- Supported Internships is a semester-long program that gives you access to our full database of over 6,000 internship and volunteer options, bracketed by two week-long retreats that allow you to connect with other travelers, get fully oriented and prepared for travel, and have time to digest and integrate your experiences upon returning to the U.S. College credit is available.
To further extend a Gap Year, you could do a LEAPYEAR followed a year of supported internships, or you could start your Gap Year travel with the One Revolution Program or a Supported Internship in the Fall Semester, followed by another two internships between January and June.
Why take a Gap Year?
Primary reasons to take a Gap Year:
- Take a break from one way of learning (in rows under fluorescent lights listening to someone talk in a classroom) before doing another four years of classroom work. A chance to break the educational trance that tells us that education is something that happens “to” us, rather than through us.
- Find a valid and personal reason to be in college – beyond the fact that “everyone else is doing it.”
- Try on a career option before making a commitment to a major in college - practice teaching in Ghana before studying education, or work in a medical clinic in Honduras before committing to pre-med study and med school, study art in a hands-on way in central Mexico to see if it's something you want to spend more time/money/study on.
- To leave home and do something real rather than contrived – step out from under your parents roof, and learn to be in the world as an adult before doing further classroom study.
- To become more mature, make mistakes, let the well fill back up, rekindle your desire to learn.
- To put your education in the context of the larger world - to gain worldly experience - to take on responsibility and give something back to others.
- To do something developmentally appropriate: When you are 18 and have spent 12 years in a classroom, it is entirely appropriate to learn for a time in a different mode. It's appropriate to find out who you are, and explore parts of the world. If you simply replace your family with a college that houses you and feeds you and asks you to jump through its hoops, you are simply replacing your parents with parental surrogates - and a vital maturation that wants to happen at this time is much less likely to happen.
Ideally, Gap Year programs should give you a break from learning in the classroom, engage your mind and body fully, and allow you to explore and develop interests that you may not have had a chance to experience. Though each Gap Year program will be different, important tips for putting together a successful Gap Year include:
- The following natural blocks of time give a good structure to gap year travel: September through early December, a holiday return home, January through March, April through June.
- Pay attention to transitions. You are most vulnerable during transitions. Pay extra to have someone meet you at the airport you fly into. Make sure you have a backup plan – such as a hotel near the airport to check into if you miss your connection.
- Consider starting with a group program - so that you have support if you are traveling abroad for the first time, and support during the inevitable homesickness and culture shock. Start with more structure at the beginning, and less at the end - so that you can develop initiative and independence.
- To save money, you can stay in the U.S. or this hemisphere - to keep transportation costs down. Stringing a series of internships together in one region will keep airfares to a minimum. Consider working where you can legally work for pay - in the U.S., UK, or Australia. You can usually receive room and board in exchange for your work, if you work in the areas of social service, teaching, agriculture, construction or hotel work. You can also build in a period of work in the U.S. to earn money for your next adventure.
- Consider starting in a foreign country with a period of language study - to get your feet on the ground, and get oriented to the culture before engaging more deeply. Plan on two weeks and up if you are brushing up a language, a month or longer of intensive study if you need to gain enough proficiency to get around comfortably. Add a homestay so that you meet their culture on their terms and are forced to practice the language you are learning.
Why use LEAPNOW to set up your Gap Year?
- Experience: LEAPNOW has been setting up gap years for students since 1994 and has assisted over 1,700 students with consultation, internships and group travel over the past 17 years.
- Depth of support: LEAPNOW provides a full spectrum of support - from simple information, to single supported internships, to group semesters, to full year structured programs.
- Academic credit: We can facilitate college credit for all of our offerings, and also facilitate high school completion while learning outside of the classroom.
- Objectivity: We will direct you to the best programs for you - not those that are best for us.
- Sanity: LEAPNOW focuses more on the wholeness of the individual than any other program we know of.
- Deep Resources: We have a database of over 6,000 intern and volunteer options in 126 countries.
From our full-year very structured and challenging LEAPYEAR program, through Learn to Serve, One Revolution and Supported Internships, LEAPNOW gives you a full spectrum of options so that you can put together YOUR ideal gap year!