Taking a Gap Year

Think about your senior year in high school, or your child's senior year in high school. Senior year is full of parties, fun, friends, and college applications. College applications are perhaps the crux of senior year. There are so many choices to make when applying to schools: early decision, early action, regular decision, major, minor, double major, ivy league or not, first choice, second choice, third choice, scholarships, grants, loans, and all other forms of financial aid. The pressure is on! This is where the questions come into play. What do you want to study? What's your major going to be? What do you want to be? What are you going to do with your life? That's a lot of questions for a high schooler to answer. Many adults don't even know what they really want to do yet. How should teenagers just figuring out what their priorities are know what they want to do with the rest of their life? Here are few reasons you or your child might want to take a year off and few tips on how to go about it.

1) Finances.
You may simply not be able to afford going to an expensive college right after a free public high school. You may just want to take off a year to work full-time and save up your money. This is a particularly good option if financial aid, grants, and scholarships don't cover your tuition appropriately or sufficiently. A year off may be just what you need to prepare yourself for your first year at college in financial terms.

2) Conflict
If you are seriously conflicted over what you want to do with your life or what your priorities are you might want to consider taking a year off. Four years is not a lot of time to decide what you want to do with the rest of your life. You don't want to waste an entire year because you lack direction. It's known that college students routinely change their majors multiple times before settling on their final major. All that changing is actually a lot of education wasting. Many times multiple changes result in a student being in college for much longer than four years, and that can be a serious drain on your finances. A year off might give you just enough time to gain some perspective on your life and determine what your priorities are.

Here are some tips if you do decide to takes some time off.

1) Make a commitment to a college.
This is to ensure that you don't decide to stay on permanent college hiatus. Apply to colleges your senior year as normal and decide where you would like to attend. Almost all colleges allow for deferred enrollment. Most simply require a request and a reason for deferring enrollement. Not going to college almost always ends up being a mistake. Without a college degree you qualify for far fewer jobs and far lower salaries. Going to college is something you want to do. Make the commitment to go to college before you take your year off.

2) Move out.
Many parents are going to object to this piece of advice. However, when it comes to determining what you want your future to be, it should be a decision you make, based on your needs and priorities. As good-intentioned as parents can be, their biases and hopes for you can sometimes get in the way of what's best for you personally. Consider working for summer before what would be your first semester and then moving to a low cost area where you can live on your own, apart from your parents. Keep in mind that you will need to completely support yourself so moving to LA or NYC may not be the most practical solution.

3) Have a plan.
Have a plan for what you want to accomplish. If your goal is to figure out what you're most interested in or what your priorities are, try things that you've always wanted to do but never got around to. Maybe you want to get involved in a particular industry, write a book, or start your own online business. Determine what you want to do and how you're going to accomplish it before you ever take your year off.