What is a Gap Year? - Global Gap Year Fellowship

What is a Gap Year?

Gaby's Global Gap Year

April 2014: Orientation at UNC

The first step on Gaby's gap year: coming to Carolina to meet new and former Fellows and learn what it takes to prepare for a gap year. It was a weekend of new friends and expert packing tips that left her even more excited to set off! (GGYF orientation is now a two-week Summer Institute.)

Read about Gaby's gap year preparations and a retreat with her fellow Fellows over the Summer!

What is a Gap Year?

Sri Lanka

September - December 2014

Gaby’s first destination: the city of Galle on the Sri Lankan coast to volunteer in an orphanage. Gaby also spent a week teaching English to young monks in a Buddhist monastery.

Read about tea, turtles, and first impressions of Galle during Gaby’s first week!

What is a Gap Year?

After a short week in Singapore to pay a visit to the U.S. embassy, Gaby landed in Ubud, Bali in time for Christmas. She discovered colorful culture, boundless rice fields, and some temple monkeys!

December 2014 - January 2015

Singapore and Ubud, Bali

Bidding a difficult farewell to Sri Lanka and exploring bustling Singapore

Experiencing Balinese culture and self-reflection in Ubud

What is a Gap Year?

Next Gaby spent four months volunteering at the Yayasan Widya Sari school in Tianyar, Bali. She taught English classes, learned traditional dance, celebrated the Balinese new year, and forged deep relationships with the people around her, from her teenage students to the Balinese workers to her German roommate.

February - May 2015

Tianyar, Bali

Step inside Gaby’s English classroom in Tianyar

What is a Gap Year?

Back in the U.S., Gaby spent the summer in San Francisco before returning to Chapel Hill to start her freshman year. During her first semester on campus she got involved with the Carolina Hispanic Association (CHispA), joined the First Year Council of the Campus Y and the NC Fellows program, and started studying politics, Portuguese, and creative writing.

Homecoming and Carolina

In September, she joined the rest of her cohort of Gap Year Fellows in Oak Island, NC for a rainy Re-Entry Retreat. They shared stories of their years abroad, read letters they wrote themselves at GGYF orientation more than a year earlier, and officially concluded their gap years together.

Gaby’s final blog post: “My gap year taught me to think for myself”

Sophie Nachman (UNC class of 2021) in Morocco, where she volunteered as a teaching assistant.

A gap year is a period of time when students take a break from formal classroom-based education to travel, volunteer, intern, or work. Typically, it is taken between high school graduation and entry into college, and it presents a wonderful opportunity for students to gain real-world experience, life skills, independence, and personal growth.

Most importantly, the gap year empowers students to create their own uniquely valuable life experiences. They can construct the learning agenda that best suits them by choosing the projects they will undertake and the countries they will visit or by participating in an already designed program.

Each year more American universities are recognizing the intrinsic value of taking a gap year. Gap years allow individual students to mature, creating highly motivated students who make greater impacts on the campuses when they arrive. As a result, an increasing number of institutions now offer admitted students the opportunity to defer their education for one year so that they may take advantage of these opportunities.

Want to learn more about gap years?

Check out some of these articles.

Gap Year May Have Benefits Long After College - New York Times >
Gap Year Data and Benefits - American Gap Association >