“I was the only one in my senior class to take a gap year and my parents were only going to let me do it if I planned out every second, essentially, of the year. Which was really upsetting because I just wanted to buy a plane ticket and leave.”
“The first three months I did a program called SeaMester where you live in a sailboat in the Caribbean. We travelled from the BVI to Grenada and back up. Take classes, learn how to sail, navigate, scuba dive, and explore the islands. 14 students and 4 instructors and we all lived together. It was amazing and I loved every second of it. To live that close to people that you’re constantly learning from is kind of a bizarre but such a wonderful experience. But towards the end I definitely wanted to go out on my own and do what I wanted to do, explore what I wanted to explore. It gave me the confidence to be a solo traveler.”
“Afterwards I went to South Africa. I lived there for a month and a half, two months, and first I worked at a vervet monkey sanctuary which was awesome but very hard work and very isolating, we were living in a bush. Then I went to Plettenberg bay, which is a coastal town, kind of a surfer town where I worked with a marine conservation program, so everything I did in Africa I was working or volunteering. They provided housing because I was basically an intern. I want to live in Plettenberg Bay someday, it is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. Hiking, Bungee Jumping, Sky diving. It’s a perfect place.”
“Then I went to a place called Gansbaai on the coast, it’s a town where the great white shark population is essentially all year round and very concentrated, I worked on one of the cage diving boats. So I was helping with clients, managing the cage, baiting the sharks. Whenever clients didn’t want to go in, I would go in the cage, which was awesome. I loved meeting so many travellers and people visiting Cape Town. You really got to know people because it’s a small boat and such an scary experience that your true self really shows. You get to know people really intimately.”
“It was actually a lot less scary than I thought it would be. It’s kind of a waiting game. You could go out and see one shark, or no sharks at all, and as a client you spent an absurd amount of money to see nothing. Or you could have literally like 3-5 meters great whites fighting over the bait. They don’t breach the water like you see in national geographic. But definitely some jumps. Definitely some Jaws action. Over time it almost became normal to see that, which I hated. But it was also awesome to have seen it that many times.
“Then I spent a couple days in Cape Town, then I went to Iringa, Tanzania, which is a really, really rural area. I worked at the regional hospital there. Each week I shadowed a doctor in a different ward. That was probably the most influential experience I’ve ever had, because it wasn’t like I was really making a difference, but I just learned so much from them. I gained a huge respect for what they did with what they had. I had no experience but I was blown away by what they could do. The doctors actually told me they were smarter than American doctors, because they use their minds whereas American doctors only use machines.”
“Also, my family came over and met me in Tanzania and we climbed mount Kilimanjaro.”
“Its definitely given me perspective about how to take advantage of everything that I can on campus. I’m constantly looking for a new experience and something to explore. Like a discipline or an activity group. Its sad that I’m always kind of looking for the adrenaline that I had on my gap year, but it was the combo of passion and learning that was so consistent in my gap year that I’ve been looking for it here. And that’s forced me to get involved in a lot.”
“What surprised me the most was probably how prepared I was after a year abroad. I definitely thought I was going to fail out within the first month. But it’s a different style of learning that if you have intellect and creativity, everything kind of comes next. Professors are kind of looking for level of thinking rather than specifics and semantics of high school learning.”
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