When you’re spending thousands of dollars on textbooks, tuition, meal plans, and housing for college, it’s important to know what you want to do with your life. Sometimes it’s daunting to think about and questions are sure to be asked about it at every holiday gathering. Even though people say college is a place to figure everything out, they can be wrong. Universities are for following dreams and making them come to life with degrees and internships. Before that happens, the student needs to know what they love and what they want to do in the world. It’s kind of like pottery making. The potter has the materials ready when he sits at the wheel. You can’t sit at the wheel and wait for the materials to show up while you’re there.

Sometimes, even if you do know where you want to go after college, it’s easy to get caught in the current of homework assignments and deadlines. It’s easy to forget what you love to do if you have to focus on other things first. Aspirations and goals should always be backed up with passion so that they can be achieved with excellency. When you’ve lost what you’re passionate about, those goals can get lost too.

If you aren’t sure about what you love to do, take a gap year. This free time can be used for research, travel, and work. Not only those three, it can be used for anything you want. You can pick up that one hobby you used to like or try out something you never thought you would have time to do. It’s a period of exploration and discovery for the mind, and it can help ignite a love for something you never knew you would be interested in. The options are endless, and the world is wide open for anyone who wants to roam it. A gap year can change the entire mindset of a person and bring to light what they never knew they wanted.

It seems like a long time, but in the long run, it will help save money and better the quality of living. A gap year can keep you from spending money on a degree that you might end up changing in a couple of months anyway. This way you can decide what you are passionate about and just pursue those ambitions with more energy than ever.

Reasons people decide not to take a gap-year can be based largely off of misconception. One of the false impressions people get from a gap-year is that it will keep a person from actually going back to college. This depends on the person. Many people who take a year off will realize that college is a practical option. The gap-year gives them another sense of direction and a wider perspective.

Even though people say that a student might fall behind in their studies because of a gap-year, that is definitely a myth. Students who have waited before starting college have actually been recorded as finishing college within four years with a GPA of 3.0 or higher. The gap-year can actually encourage students to work harder on homework and listen better in class.

When I first started college, I took a year to contemplate exactly what I wanted for a degree, and that time away from the rush of college gave me a boost. If a person wants to refresh their outlook on their pursuits and on the future, taking a year off could reshape the next couple of years in school. It’ll save money, restart determination, and clarify what a person hopes for their career after school.