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The following post was written by Global Gap Year Fellow Nya Patton. Nya is spending the first part of her gap year in Brazil working on rainforest conservation with Iracambi.

So, you’ve arrived in this country, ready to learn, give what you can to the community, and put your hands to use. However, after a couple of weeks you realize that the organization is not used to having full time volunteers like you, and the infrastructure is not really built to keep you occupied and busy all of the time. Don’t fret! This happens every once and awhile, and although it may disappoint you at first, there is much gratitude to find in having ample free time in a completely new country or city. Knowing that, you can begin to create little goals for yourself and plan new activities to do in your country. There is so much value in allowing […]

The following post was written by Global Gap Year Fellow Matthew Lu. Matthew is spending the first part of his gap year in Shenzhen, China. 

I knew that I’d have some use of this translation tool, so I had the foresight to download the Chinese option before I left. Oh, how fortuitous that was (though technically I could still do it now with my VPN).

It seems that growing up in a Mandarin-speaking family had left me a little overconfident about my language abilities. Of course, I acknowledged that I’d have some troubles in China speaking and understanding, but I had relegated this to a small ditch I’d step over instead of a massive canyon spanned by a tiny bridge held aloft by the aforementioned tool. That’s not to say that I’ve been completely lost. Thankfully, growing up with the language, the grammar (or most of it) flows naturally, something I’m […]

The following post was written by Global Gap Year Fellow Sarah Duncan. Sarah is spending the first half of her gap year in Seoul, South Korea. 

Media surrounds us everywhere we go. You see it in the form of billboards on the highway, magazines at a doctor’s office, ads before a video, and plenty more. In fact, most of us (approximately 5 billion people, to be exact) keep a small device full of media in our pocket, giving us instant access to news stories from all across the world. This vast amount of media is quite overwhelming and can even become toxic, but the fact still remains that most of us can easily access it from a variety of sources whenever we want.  This is the society we live in today- one where we have developed a dependency on digital tools, which has ultimately granted many of us access to easier […]

The following post was written by Bridge Year Fellow Karen Xu. Karen is spending the first part of her brudge year in Mexicali, Mexico with California Department of Public Health’s Office of Binational Border Health .

The first time I applied to a gap year program at the end of high school, I was 17. I was too young to apply for UNC’s Global Gap Year Fellowship at the time, so I applied to Global Citizen Year- and was accepted! I was set to go to Ecuador, more excited than I had ever been. However, I ended up being unable to go. I remember the disappointment of that excitement being taken from me, the path to a gap year being cut off. But two years later, after going through my freshman and sophomore year of college, here I am, embarking on the gap year that my 17-year-old self dreamed of. […]