The Life-Changing Adventures of the Gap Year

2016_05_JP-on-horseback-at-pyramids.jpgThe author found time for a few touristy activities during his 14 months living in Cairo, Egypt in 1994-1995.

For many people, the trajectory through life goes something like this: Fumble awkwardly through high school, muddle semi-soberly through college, slave away at a low-paying job or several jobs, and then back into a career that doesn’t excite or suit them. And once they start a family, they feel it’s too late to change course.

Some points along the way, however, are ripe for detours, experiments, and adventures, all of which are opportunities to shake things up or sharpen your focus on what you really want out of life. Take the “gap year,” for example: that exciting time that comes after earning an undergraduate degree.

“The teens and 20s are the wandering years. They aren’t very stable. People wander from job to job post college, so they’re not tied to much. That’s a great time to explore in a systematic way,” says Holly Bull, director of the Center for Interim Programs in Princeton, NJ.

“Students are so programmed by their academic path they don’t stop and ask themselves, ‘Who am I? What am I interested in?’,” Bull continues. “They should be allowed to go find what lights them up. If they do and they find it, they’ll probably be successful at it. But going out and doing that is a risk. At the end of their path to a college degree, most grads just want to get a job.”

Bull says college and graduate school admissions officers are increasingly encouraging young people to take time off to travel, volunteer, or intern before diving back into academia (or the work force). Those who take gap time, she says, often show up on campus more emotionally mature and focused.

Employers, too, are looking for young people with real-world experience and skills, the confidence to take initiative, and the ability to serve as productive team members. Gap years help give them that edge.

Nearly 30 years ago, I didn’t know about this gap year concept. It’s just what I did. As a young adult, I twice left everything that was familiar about the rural Mid-West, where I grew up, to live for extended periods in huge, congested cities in the Middle East—specifically, Istanbul, Turkey, and Cairo, Egypt.

I didn’t set out to differentiate myself or make myself more marketable—I just couldn’t be bothered to finish high school before kick-starting my life. In 1988, I traded my senior year for a year as an exchange student in Istanbul. And shortly after I earned my bachelor’s degree in journalism, in the fall of 1994, I flew to Cairo for a three-month internship at an English-language weekly newspaper. I ended up staying there 14 months.

Nowadays, such an experience would likely be referred to as a gap year—an opportunity to immerse oneself in a new place with new people and bring about new ways of thinking. All I knew at the time, though, was I needed to see more of the world before I could think of settling down in any one corner of it.

Leaving High School for a New World

Uninspired by any high school subject that didn’t require me to write essays (yeah, I was that kid), I joined the staff of the school newspaper and yearbook, and self-published my own “zines.” I was accepted into the exchange student program (on the strength of, you guessed it, a couple essays) and was then sent to a foreign land that I ranked 36th out of the 45 listed participating countries.

Little did I know, private school in Istanbul would be far more restrictive than the classroom environment I left behind. Every day I wore a school uniform, complete with a stiflingly tight tie and blazer, as I sat clueless and bored as teachers rotated through the classroom speaking a language I was struggling to learn. When I wasn’t entertaining my Turkish classmates with my comical efforts at communicating in their tongue, I spent my school time reading classics of world literature (about which I, again, wrote essays that allowed me to graduate with my class back home).

More stimulating for me was the freedom I had to move about Istanbul by foot, dolmus (shared taxis in the form of 1950s-era American classic cars), and ferries bringing workers and families across a city that lay in both Asia and Europe. I loved nothing more than sitting along the ferry railings sipping small glasses of sweet tea and chewing on a simit—rings of fresh sesame seed bread—while watching huge cargo ships ply the churning waters of the Bosporus Strait against a background of the domes and minarets of the massive mosques.

A ferry crosses the Bosporus Strait from the European to Asian side of Istanbul.
A ferry crosses the Bosporus Strait from the European to Asian side of Istanbul.
Joel Patenaude

That experience convinced me I could chart my own course through any amount of madness life threw at me. But if given another chance to live abroad, I knew I’d need to work or otherwise feel productive, not sit still and let the teaching come to me.

I was fortunate to have parents who supported this philosophy. Too many parents, however, are fearful about letting their children pursue such opportunities. Will they flounder if they leave the nest early and unsupervised?, they worry. What if their kid, still unsure of what s/he wants to do with his or her life, takes a break from schooling and makes it permanent, never to get off the basement couch again?

But, as experts point out, the rewards often far outweigh the risks (and fears) when it comes the gap year. Rather than be a time to slack off, a gap experience can quickly sharpen the focus of a young person previously floating through life unsure and unmotivated. But it can also expand the horizons of someone like me, who has specific interests but needs a chance to explore and apply them.

“I get upset when people think this is only for that clueless student,” says Richard Blomgren, a longtime vice-president of admissions at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC, who’s now director of admissions and marketing for North Carolina Outward Bound, one of 11 outdoor education schools in the U.S. “This can actually be for the hyper-focused student, too. Yes, it can be a great place for the so-called ‘clueless kid,’ but there are some wonderfully talented and gifted students that can have their choice of jobs and grad schools who are saying, ‘I want to be a more well-rounded person first.’”

Adventures in Foreign Correspondency

The author, right, works with a colleague in the Cairo office of The Middle East Times Egypt Edition in 1994.
The author, right, works with a colleague in the Cairo office of The Middle East Times Egypt Edition in 1994.
Joel Patenaude

I returned home from Istanbul and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a B.A. in journalism. But again, I found I learned far more outside the classroom, writing for one of the school newspapers, working at a local radio station, and interning at a monthly political magazine.

Before graduating, I applied for and got an internship through the Washington, D.C.-based National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, which at the time paired J-school grads with English-language publications from Jordan to Saudi Arabia.

I went to work at The Middle East Times, a now defunct weekly newspaper based in Cairo. It was a scrappy little paper, staffed by expats from England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Canada and the U.S., as well as highly educated young Muslim women. Through both brazen and subtle means, the paper challenged the authoritarian regime of then President Hosni Mubarak—decades before he would be overthrown by the Egyptian citizenry—and not surprisingly found itself frequently censored by the Egyptian Ministry of Information.

At the paper, I copyedited the sometimes snarky but always insightful work of brave and wily journalists, some of whom were frequently detained by police merely for asking questions. That was well before the government brutally put down the Arab Spring revolution in 2011. It’s heartbreaking to see what’s happened in Egypt since I lived there, when I could walk unmolested after dark from Tahrir Square to the apartment I shared with my managing editor in Zamalek a few miles away.

Cairo's Tahrir Square, ground zero for the 2011 Arab Spring, was quieter in 1994. That's when the author lived there and worked part-time at the American University in Cairo, upper right.
Cairo’s Tahrir Square, ground zero for the 2011 Arab Spring, was quieter in 1994. That’s when the author lived there and worked part-time at the American University in Cairo, upper right.
Joel Patenaude

In Cairo, I also got a behind-the-scenes look at the state-run media by working briefly on the copy desk of the propagandistic Al-Ahram Weekly . And I drew a paycheck as the editor of the faculty newsletter for the American University in Cairo—all on a tourist visa I had to cross my fingers and hope immigration officials would renew every couple months.

Once at a party in downtown Cairo, I met an affable man named Anthony Shadid, who also graduated from UW-Madison and wrote for the same student newspaper as I did four years earlier. Our friendly chat predated the start of Shadid’s storied career as a Middle East correspondent, during which he won two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting on the Iraq War, and wrote four stellar books about the region. Tragically, Shadid died in Syria of an acute asthma attack in February 2012. He was just 46, the age I am today.

As much as I admired and envied Shadid’s career, I was not cut out to be a foreign correspondent. Cairo taught me that. While I took advantage of the ample and decent paying work available there for a native English speaker, I had much less time or aptitude for learning Arabic. That left me reliant on translators for every source I interviewed for a story—like when I reported on the Zabbaleen, Cairo’s most poverty-stricken community of Christian garbage collectors, and the nomadic Bedouin culture still surviving in the Sinai Peninsula. Ironically, the longer I stayed in Cairo, the more I felt like a fraud as a journalist.

“That’s the kind of information you can pick up fairly quickly—whether something suits you or not. That’s the beauty of gap time,” Bull says. So, as important as it is to find what you’re good at and love to do, discovering what leaves you uninspired is a big part of the journey, too.

“I call it striking matches rather than attempting to start fires,” Bull says. “Some matches are going to blow out, while some will start small fires you may tend to later on.”

After my time in the Middle East, I continued to follow my passion for print journalism through the 2000s at a series of small daily and weekly newspapers in the Midwest and West, and at a monthly magazine I helmed for 12 years in Wisconsin. I’m certain I got those early newsroom staff positions because of the time I spent abroad honing my skills, proving myself versatile, and opening myself up to cultures and value systems different from my own.

In fact, one of my first employers said he hired me “because [he likes] to have fascinating people around.”

Mind the Gap

A gap year, or any extended time spent in another culture, for that matter, takes adventure to new heights.
A gap year, or any extended time spent in another culture, for that matter, takes adventure to new heights.
Guillén Pérez

Most of the 6,000-plus people Bull’s center has counseled and placed in gap programs since 1982 were between high school and college. But some 950 were “stepaways” (students taking time off from college), and another 200 or more took time to explore the world after completing their undergraduate work.

“Our oldest gapper is 72 and the youngest is 14,” Bull says. “But the main group is between 17 and 22, because they can take the time more easily.”

Outward Bound, meanwhile, offers unique gap experiences to people of all ages by incorporating team building, individual development, and community service. “For instance, my school in North Carolina offers a gap semester that combines a U.S. wilderness experience along with time spent in the Patagonia region of Argentina. Both of those have components in service and cross-cultural understanding,” Blomgren explains.

Outward Bound, founded more than 50 years ago, appeals to students in environmental studies, science, and education. OB also offers veterans tuition-free courses through which they can reintegrate into civilian life after serving in a foreign conflict.

Of course, college grads can also use gap time to travel on their own, keeping their itinerary flexible, and still have life-changing experiences.

Getting to know different cultures is one of the best parts of spending time abroad.
Getting to know different cultures is one of the best parts of spending time abroad.
Isabel Sommerfeld

Bronwen Kent, an international relations and political science major at UW-Madison, left for Europe a few weeks after graduating in 1993. With connections she made as a member of AIESEC , an international student organization, Kent based herself in Germany, and spent months traveling the continent. When she ran out of money, she took on extended housecleaning and babysitting gigs.

Kent would go on to work in international sales, through which she met her husband and started a family while living for several years in Malaysia and Singapore. They now reside in Vermont.

“That trip was one of the biggest influences on how my life ended up today,” she says.

“I think one reason my trip was such a positive experience was that it was not part of a program or group,” she reflects. “There was no pre-destined itinerary or goal. It was just me with a plane ticket a Lonely Planet guidebook, a little money, a sense of adventure, and a passport (and my boyfriend’s apartment, where I could crash). I think overseas experiences are invaluable for anyone, no matter how you can get them.”

But you don’t have to go abroad to have a meaningful gap experience. There’s worthy work for 18- to 24-year-olds through organizations like AmeriCorps and the Corporation for National and Community Service. Scores more leads are offered by the American Gap Association. All you need to take advantage of them are an imagination, willingness to do some digging—and, of course, a sense of adventure.

Joel Patenaude is a regional editor for RootsRated.com. His time in Cairo sparked a 22-year career as a daily and weekly newspaper reporter and magazine editor. He would welcome the opportunity to take another gap year.

Featured image provided by Joel Patenaude

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