Gap years don’t look like year long holidays for most people, pandemic or not. They’re a timely opportunity to save up, volunteer, work on your mental health, and get some experience of a life that doesn’t revolve around exams. It’s also worth noting that most of the time, that stereotype of putting on posh accents as the lighthearted jokes about visiting different cultures in luxury and being funded by the bank of mum and dad, simply doesn’t fit.
Despite this stereotype, gap years are great for buying yourself some time to figure out your next steps, and avoid rushing into a course that might turn out to be a mistake. After hating every second of my A-levels, and realising that time was exactly what I needed, in 2019 I turned down my uni offers and got a second job. And that was the start of my gap year.
Spending the first half of my year out – in pre-Covid times – doing little else but working, meant that by the end of 2019, I had saved up enough to plan some travelling and I’m so grateful that these plans weren’t cancelled because of Covid-19. There are reasons why the Southeast Asia gap-year trip is a cliche: it’s relatively affordable if you’re careful, the food and the sights are unlike anything else, and spending weeks by yourself on the other side of the world does leave you feeling like you’ve achieved something.
Travelling seems to be a major reason why people take time out from education in normal times, so it’s understandable that others in my gap-year cohort would say that a year out this year wasn’t a good thing at all. Many of my friends had trips planned for spring/summer last year, so they lost out completely on the entire reason why they’d saved up and delayed university in the first place due to travel restrictions and lockdown.
It seemed as though everyone, gap year or not, found themselves looking back in hindsight at the choices they had made in the months before lockdown. Whether it was those around that gap-year age regretting taking overtime shifts that could have been spent with friends, or first-year university students wondering if they should have deferred.
I was included in that group of frustrated wishful-thinkers at the time, and on an individual level that can only be detrimental. Looking back, I have to focus almost unreasonably on the positives of the experience, and despite everything, I’ve subsequently convinced myself that a year out was a good choice – I would never have spent so much time with my family otherwise, and now I’m not sure when I’ll be allowed to see them again, that seems all the more valuable.
I could see how hard it was for first-year friends trying to work from home, and sometimes felt guilty that I was able to spend my time learning new skills or reading instead. Losing one job and being furloughed from the other was not ideal, but it meant I landed work in a warehouse, where ridiculously long hours helped me save for university costs.
When the new academic year began, new university-goers received sympathetic comments and slightly annoying jokes about how we’d missed out on freshers week and the whole first year experience of club nights, flat parties and societies. It’s probably true that we’ve missed out, but I hold onto the fact that we’re better off not knowing what university is like outside of Covid-19, because then we can’t actually gauge what we’re missing. And of course, anyone who also took a year out from uni or was in a similar position knows that the mundanity of months at home hardly compares to the strain on essential or frontline workers.
Maybe it does seem like a gap year in a pandemic is a waste of time, but I’d argue that like any other time, it is what you make it. We all made, and are all still making, the best decisions for ourselves that we possibly can. It was a good thing for me because I’ve learned and gained experience, time with family and had a little bit of travel in the mix. I’d make the same decision again in a heartbeat.
