Gap Year

We are sheltering for a while here in our house toward the end of Cape Cod, a house we rent out in the summer and enjoy (a lot) in the not-summer. The local consolidated High School covers the outermost four towns on the Cape – basically, the forearm and hand of the arm-shaped Cape. I was reading the bios of the graduating Seniors (it's been a long quarantine...) in the Provincetown paper, and I was struck by the number of students who had committed to take a gap year before college.

More than half were heading off for college (most to state schools or Cape Cod Community College), but nearly a third were taking gap years, or were not sure what they'd be doing. That seemed to be a lot, and I wondered if it were because there is so much uncertainty about everything at the moment – even whether a particular college will be in session in the fall. I did some Googling and discovered that gap years are suddenly the thing that you recommend to graduating Seniors.

I've always been in favor of a gap year, or even two. College provides a very narrow view of life in general, and, in general, is not a great way to prepare for life*. Some perspective can be very valuable, especially at that impressionable age.

All this got me thinking – potentially, thousands of graduating Seniors who would normally move right to college will, instead, be finding their way through the new world on their own. I can't imagine that this can be anything but a good thing.

I went to college because it was expected – the mid-century's American dream. There's still a lot of that going around (one of the students said in her bio that she was the first in her family to go to college). What if a lot more students made decisions based on what they found in the real world, and not what everyone told them they should do? What if they chose courses of study based on some real-world experiences – or maybe decided not to go to college at all?

If we all stop and remember how we ended up in the careers we pursued or are pursuing, many of us, myself included, would realize that a lot of serendipity was involved – the right place at the right time, stumbling onto an opportunity, one door closing and another one opening. Apparently random experiences that opened whole new worlds. How far were our careers from what we studied? Imagine if we had all spent a year or two wandering around a world we'd have to inhabit in the future, learning its ins and outs, and bumping into chance and opportunity and that random person or event that changed everything.

So the new world, which will be fueled, more and more as time goes on, by these graduating Seniors, might be more... what? Coherent? Satisfying? Will the new problems inherent in the new world be addressed by young people who have had a chance to figure out what's what?

I hope so. Best wishes, class of 2020.

* - In my experience, it's also not a great way to prepare for a career, but that's grist for another mill.