Undergraduate school: the future home for the next four years for the senior class. However three students out of the 166 will be travelling completely on their own path. For them, college can wait a year.

Current seniors Thomas Enzminger, Adam Perelman, and Elaine Song have opted to take a gap year and will begin college the fall of 2011.
For Thomas, the main motivation to postpone his studies was to take a rest from learning.

“I thought that by taking a year off I might be able to kind of recharge and get some more enthusiasm back before going into college, because I don’t think it’s good to be jaded going in,” Thomas said.

Because his decision to take a gap year was made on the spur of the moment, his plans for the coming year are not yet finalized; but he hopes to find a job and travel.

Thomas chose to take a gap year partly because the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the college he plans to attend, offers a year off as an opportunity for its students.

Adam, who will be attending Stanford University, wanted to take a gap year because
“I kind of wanted to go do something different before I got back to the same place I’ve always lived,” he said.

For the first few months of the academic year, Adam will be interning at Facebook. Working for a software engineer, he will be writing programs that are used in photo applications and other related systems. Afterward, he is considering volunteering and perhaps working abroad in South America, since he grew up speaking Spanish.

Elaine’s choice, on the other hand, was primarily structured around her family.

“Because my dad has cancer, I decided that it would be better to stay home a little longer,” she said.

For the majority of what would be her first semester, Elaine plans to secure a job.
“Then, I’m thinking about tutoring around the area,” she said.

In February 2011, she plans to travel to New York and begin working with a Non-Governmental Organization until April. After her year off, she will attend the University of Pennsylvania.

While all three students have already been accepted into their respective colleges, they will enroll as members of the class of 2015. Nonetheless, this separation from their current classmates does not seem to preoccupy them.

“It’s a little bit weird to think that I’m going to be graduating with most of the [current] juniors, but I think in college it’s not a big deal of what grade you’re in,” Adam said.

Elaine also felt that her experiences during the year off would outweigh the disadvantages of graduating one year later.
“At first, I felt that I was being left behind by my classmates, but I realized that you’ll have this whole year to have something that your friends will never be able to do,” Elaine said.

The parents of the three students are all supportive of their decisions. For Elaine and Thomas, their parents were among the first to actually suggest the idea to them.

Because Thomas was having difficulty deciding between his college options, his mother suggested taking a year off to work.
“That’s what she did, and so she was pretty open to it,” Thomas said.

Although Adam’s parents were hesitant at first, they eventually understood the value of his choice to take a gap year.
“I knew that they were going to support me no matter what, but my parents weren’t huge fans of the idea for the first couple months,” he said. “[After] I ended up getting the internship, [they were] happy that I’ll have a job, that I’ll be getting some real world experience, and that I’ll be getting my adventures in,” he said.

College Counselor Kevin Lum-Lung emphasized that taking a gap year is not for everyone. “It’s an option that not a lot of people pursue,” he said “but there can be great benefits from taking a year off.” He said that the some students after experiencing a gap year entered school at the university level more focused and with a clearer purpose.

All three students are anticipating the freedom and unstructured lifestyle that the gap year has to offer.

“I’m looking forward to [being able] to structure my entire year based on what I really want to do and I think that is something that is hard to have in high school and maybe in college,” Elaine said.

Yet with this freedom comes the responsibility of ensuring that the year is not wasted.

“[Gap years] always work out a lot better when you have a plan,” Adam said.

From all the people Adam talked to who had taken a gap year, none seemed to regret their decision. Even Elaine agreed from her own research that, “[those] who take a gap year are usually very happy.”