This Just Isn’t Working
After writing the first edition of the book, we got a smattering of questions from students and parents about circumstances that rearrange the typical undergrad experience. Most of their what-if scenarios could be grouped under “Plan A isn’t working; is it time for Plan B?” We have collected those questions here and added, for lack of a better spot, another very different departure from college—study abroad. Collectively they add up to a single idea: sometimes the way to get the best out of your college is simply to get out of college, at least for a while.
More often than you think. Some eighteen-year-olds are ready to take full responsibility for their every action and decision, but there are many others who are not ready intellectually, emotionally, or financially. If we had to make an educated guess, we would suspect there are more students erring on the side of going to college too early than going to college too late.
Increasingly, students are delaying entry into college by a year or two; we see this as a positive trend. In England, this is called a “gap year,” and it is a well-established custom.
The stress of getting good grades, padding the resume with interesting activities, drafting clever admission essays, filling out onerous financial aid statements, and visiting countless campuses to hear the same overly cheerful tour guides brag about their lives—all of this can leave a student drained. Sure, you are excited to get the big, fat envelope, but you are also likely emotionally exhausted and need a break.
Another contributor to many students’ decision to leave school is the upward-spiraling costs of college and the downward-spiraling economy. Many families are discovering that they simply are not yet prepared for the financial burden of tuition.
Finally, some students are just not sure what they want out of college. They reason that it might be better to at least have a general aim before signing on for four years. Even if you are very ready to leave home (and Mom and Dad aren’t too sad about the idea either), that doesn’t necessarily mean you are ready to go to college.
Whatever the impetus, we tend to agree. College is a costly proposition and shouldn’t be what high school seniors do next simply because high school is over. The gap year is not a negative; it’s an alternative. And in many cases, it’s a positive.
As a rule of thumb, we recommend that all students give serious thought to taking a gap year and that some students actually do, but here are a few of what we would consider to be good reasons:
College is a costly proposition and shouldn’t be what high school seniors do next simply because high school is over. The gap year is not a negative; it’s an alternative. And in many cases, it’s a positive.
You can’t afford college. If you have exhausted all possibilities by speaking with financial aid officers at various universities and you still can’t make the numbers balance, take a year off to work one to two jobs and live a very meager lifestyle in order to save enough money to enroll next fall. Delaying college for that purpose will make for a very rich experience, will help you value your education even more than the average freshman, and will enhance your educational narrative when you interview for your first job post-college and speak on the subject of dedication and being self-motivated.
You are burned out emotionally and intellectually. Yes, college can refire students who got listless by the end of high school. But we have seen the opposite happen too: a student arrives with little gas in his intellectual engine and quickly stalls under the academic and social pressures of college. Many of the crutches that propped up students and helped them hobble to the finish line in high school are absent in college (or are harder to access because they require student initiative). If you are already limping, take a year off to restore yourself.
You are immature. This is a hard one to assess on your own, as most people who are too immature for college are not mature enough to realize that fact. All we can say is if there is any doubt in your mind (or your parents’ minds), take a gap year. The freedoms of college are heady stuff even for mature adolescents, but they have laid low many a first-year student who simply needed more time to grow up before jumping into the fray.
You have a very focused and narrow interest, and it is not well-suited to the schools you got into. One of us has a goddaughter, Tracy, who faced that very situation. She applied to Carnegie Mellon because of its unique program for directing plays that, in her estimation, is unrivaled nationwide. She didn’t get in, though she did get into other schools with programs that were not as attractive. We advised her to take a year off and work; she was heavily involved in directing local community theater during that year and when Tracy applied a second time, she got in. That extra year made her a better actress and director and a more attractive candidate.
However, having played up the gap year, let us provide some perspective and balance. We are not saying that you shouldn’t go to college until you know exactly what you want to do and have a detailed road map for every class, major, and extracurricular decision you need to make. That’s hugely unrealistic. Some degree of uncertainty and apprehension is healthy, not to mention unavoidable. It is the incredibly rare student who accurately perceives the end point from the start of his undergraduate career. What we’re suggesting is that you go to college in pursuit of something.
Your grand entrance into the college scene should not be determined by traditional age of entry (because your dad went to college when he was eighteen), by smarts (because academic intelligence doesn’t equal social intelligence), or by your peers (because everyone else is leaving for college and you don’t want to look like a flunky). It should be based on your individual ability to embrace the learning for what it is and encounter the challenges and opportunities of college with as much maturity and wisdom as can be hoped for in a freshman.
There is almost no stigma in taking a gap year. Once you are finished with college, no one cares when you started. If you have a good story for why you took a break—such as to save money or experience a 9-to-5 job without the benefit of a college degree—it can only help you. Just don’t waste that year.
If you are going to waste your year, you might as well waste it out of college, without paying the tuition or racking up Fs on your transcript. So in that sense, if you are going to blow it, blow it on a gap year.
That massive disclaimer aside, our vision for the gap year is something far more intentional than sitting on the couch mastering a fine array of consoles from Sony, Apple, and Nintendo.
The optimum plan depends on the reason for delaying entry. Tracy, who applied to CMU, used the time to beef up her acting and directing portfolio. What could you do with the time?
If finances are holding you back, the optimum plan is clearly to save as much money as you can. If you are in this situation, it really doesn’t matter how prestigious your job is. This is not the career-marking internship we describe elsewhere in the book. Whatever piles up the tuition money the fastest—whether waiting tables, catching crab in Alaska, or nannying—is the job you should take. In fact, this kind of experience will likely yield a double benefit. It will improve your prospects for getting into a more prestigious college because you show the initiative and responsibility of managing your finances. And it will help you appreciate college more because you will get a taste of what jobs you would be eligible for without a college degree.
If you are burned out intellectually, a year of menial labor or, if you can afford it, stimulating international travel may be just what the doctor ordered to reenergize your fried neurons. We recommend that you assign yourself some quality reading during the interval so as not to get out of the academic groove altogether. We realize that Catcher in the Rye can be a drag if it is forced on you by your high school English teacher, but you might discover that a year spent reading the classics is fun when you are doing it just because you can.
If you are immature, the gap year can help you grow up. Heck, even if you are mature, a year in the “real world” can add some valuable wrinkles to your brow. The gap year enables students to take on some of the responsibilities and life skills a freshman would face—such as setting your own curfew and choosing how to eat and when to exercise—without the added pressure of academics.
For this to work, we recommend that gap-year students negotiate an arrangement with their parents that is different from high school. Tracy and her parents worked out a deal where they charged her partial rent during her year off in order to incentivize her to stay focused on the goal (and to keep her from staying home longer than she needed). While it may have been frustrating at the time, even that little bit of “tough love” gave her the extra push she needed.
We know of some students who have taken a gap year to work on a political campaign because they feel so strongly about a candidate or issue that they want to devote themselves to it completely. Others have taken the year to volunteer for some significant community service, such as Clark, who went to South America with his church during the fall semester to help take medical support and basic education to a village there. He wisely chose to delay for the entire year rather than enroll in the spring so that he could enter the university in the fall with an entire class of new faces.
Khalita’s is another unique situation—she had an opportunity to dance with a professional dance company out of high school, so she delayed entry for that year and joined as a freshman with an incredible experience bolstering her confidence. The bottom line is that if there is something you want to explore—a profession or a culture or a way to give back—and it is within your means to do so and seems a wise use of time, go for it. College can wait.
It’s important to note that while universities support students taking a gap year, there is no guarantee that if you have already been accepted by a particular college that they will let you defer without a significant reason, such as a unique learning opportunity, life experience, or health issue. If you ask to delay simply because you don’t feel ready, they may ask you to reapply once you are ready. It’s not that your future university is trying to punish you; it’s that they want to be sure you will return to campus the following year as the best you can possibly be, and sometimes the best way for them to know that is to reevaluate you a year later … which leads us to our next question.
There are two schools of thought on when you should apply if you anticipate you may want to delay entry. (And this rests squarely on our first point that timing is really critical to the whole discussion of taking a gap year.) The first school of thought suggests that you go ahead and apply at the same time as your peers even if you expect to delay. The reasoning behind this suggestion is that your mind will be thoroughly entrenched in academics and you will have a support system of teachers and school counselors ready to help look over your application essays or SAT scores and give you advice. The challenge with applying before the delay, of course, is where the other school of thought comes in—that you’re already burned-out and busy. It may be overwhelming to ask that you have your credentials perfect by fall of your senior year when your sophomore SAT scores may be horrendous and you’re already challenged with staying on top of academics and extracurriculars without adding college tours and applications to the mix. Included in that is the possibility that, once accepted, the university may not approve your gap year request. Assuming you know going into your senior year that you’d like to delay entry into college for a year, consider skipping the application process entirely. Since the college that accepts you now may or may not be willing to allow you to delay, save yourself the headache and the double application fees!
If you decide to go the second route, be sure to get all of your letters of recommendation ahead of time (your high school counseling center should be willing to store them confidentially for an extended period of time once they understand you plan to delay). As for SATs and other tests, you will do better to take them while your mind is at its sharpest, so take them on a normal schedule, if possible, during your senior year. The scores tend to have a shelf life of a year or two, so do your research. Polish your senior year transcript so that once you do apply it will be clear that you finished high school at the top of your game. Even if your gap is spent burger flipping by day and babysitting by night to save money for books, that’s a very respectable use of a year and one that will prove to colleges that you are serious about getting an education.
The military has a sharp dividing line between the enlisted ranks and the officer ranks. Enlisted is roughly equivalent to blue collar and officer is roughly equivalent to white collar. The officers are in command of the enlisted, but there is a rigid hierarchy of senior versus junior within both. Historically, few in the enlisted ranks had a college degree (though that is changing), whereas almost everyone in the officer ranks had a college degree. There are a few exceptions, but generally you cannot start out as an officer unless you have a college degree.
The great strength of the US military is the quality of its personnel, especially the enlisted ranks. And the US government has found ways to try to repay those soldiers for their service. One important way is through the GI Bill, which provides funds for college and other post–high school educational opportunities to veterans who have served in the military. Another important program is the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, which recruits new officers by giving them partial college scholarships in exchange for their commitment to serve in the military for a given period of time.
Both of these pathways are time-honored ways to meet the costs of college tuition and to serve one’s country. But there is a substantial difference between the enlisted and the officer experience. As valuable as the enlisted soldiers are, it’s worth pointing out that officers enjoy higher rank, more perks, and, on average, significantly higher paychecks. Should you decide to join the military first in lieu of college, there is an opportunity to transfer from enlisted to officer once you have earned your college degree, but it isn’t automatic and requires an extra measure of planning.
Beyond the financial incentives, the military is also an exceptional way to gain life skills. Indeed, it may be the absolutely fastest way to grow up. But it is not for everyone, and you should weigh the decision carefully. Nowadays joining the military means you will face life-and-death decisions not only in theory but also in practice. If you join, you should expect to be deployed to a war zone, no matter what your recruiting officer tells you. Joining the military is not even close to taking a job stocking shelves at Big Mart for a gap year; expect it to be the greatest physical and mental challenge of your life. We have a great deal of respect for those in the military and for the sacrifices they, and their families, must make on a daily basis: Anne worked as a contractor with the US Army in Seoul for two years and Peter served in the Naval Reserve for nine years. Because of our respect for those sacrifices, we believe you should understand the full picture of possibilities and choices before making a decision.
Many students decide to attend a community college (CC) for two years to save money and get grad reqs out of the way, and then transfer to a larger university for the last two years of college. The upside of this plan is that it is cheaper than doing the normal four years at a regular university. The CC experience can also be a valuable stepping-stone for students who don’t feel academically prepared for a university experience and want to start a little slower.
The pattern of transferring from a community college to a university is more prevalent at large state schools, since they compete well for students whose financial situation requires a high degree of price sensitivity. A CC transfer can function quite well in a large school, as there are often many others in the same situation. Students find it more difficult to transfer into a small college because freshman year is a crucial time for forging bonds of friendship, and it becomes increasingly difficult to penetrate the culture off schedule.
Another critical difference in where you transfer is the exchange of classes. Transfer from a CC to a typical regional public university and you will find that the class size and quantity of prof interaction will not be that different; however, transfer from a CC to a typical liberal arts college and you will find yourself in a totally different world. The best fit depends on the individual. While one may be easier than the other, the harder option sometimes has a higher payoff.
Bluntly put, we believe a move of less than ten or twenty spots on the ladder simply is not worth it. The measurements are not that precise and there is not enough difference between the fifteenth-best school in the US and the tenth-best school to warrant the costs associated with transferring. However, if you’re in a school ranked seventy-five or lower and you get the chance to transfer to a top twenty school, that could make enough of a difference in your postcollege options to justify all of the disruption of moving.
Transferring to make college more affordable may make more sense. But first talk with a financial aid counselor on campus to be sure you have fully exhausted your resources, especially if you feel that your current school is a great personal fit for you. There are a lot of different possibilities with loans and, too frequently, students make assumptions about loans without first checking with the financial aid office.
We are more sympathetic to transfers driven by economic necessity than by transfers driven by personal unhappiness. The key to college happiness largely revolves around the decisions you make within your setting and the attitude you bring to campus, and is determined less by the setting itself. There is an old joke: the common denominator in all your problems is you. A lot of the problems that made you unhappy in school A will likely follow you to school B. Over the years, we’ve come to realize that students’ “happy meters” are not determined by campus climate, eateries, or architecture. Students will notice them and campus guides will wax eloquent about them, but the primary influencers on students’ well-being are relationships with their peers and professors, which you can more easily influence by changing your approach than by changing your address.
We know many successful transfer students (including Anne Crossman), but our general advice is to avoid transferring if possible. A lot of what you pay for with your college degree takes a solid four years to accrue; that experience is amputated when you divide your time between two institutions.
Above all, recognize that a college course is not a college course is not a college course. Every college jealously guards its curriculum, and every college has its own unique curriculum requirements. While a beginner French course will likely be viewed as interchangeable, an intermediate course in psychology may not. Swapping those credits will be difficult, and even if you earned distribution or grad req credit for the course at your original university, most likely you will not be able to use that course to meet those requirements at your new school. As a rule, colleges prefer their own courses and as a result will apply only their courses to their grad requirements, even if your courses were taken at a well-respected university.
We know of one student who transferred from one top ten university to another halfway through his undergrad career, not for academic but for personal reasons. Even though Jed had performed strongly in his sociology courses at University A, only a third of them were accepted for credit at University B. The great number of courses (and graduation requirements) that were not fully accepted had such a crippling effect on his transcript, in fact, that he was faced with the choice of starting over with his sociology degree or selecting a new major entirely. His list of accepted sociology courses was so puny that he couldn’t even use them to earn a minor (and he was unable to take further courses to meet the minor requirements until he had first retaken all the introductory courses that he had taken at his previous school). It was devastating. All that money invested into courses that, in the end, didn’t add up to a degree. Strangely enough, a few history courses he had taken on a whim transferred unscathed, so he decided to become a history major. As he puts it, he worked his butt off with course overloads for the next four semesters to graduate on time, taking whatever classes met grad requirements whether the professor was good or not; transferring came at a great cost to the quality of his academic and social life, but he pulled it off.
As in Jed’s case, should you transfer halfway through your undergrad career, you will have only two years to complete your new university’s graduation requirements instead of the usual four. As a result, you won’t have the luxury of shopping for professors as much as you would have had if you had been at that institution for all four years—you will have to take what you can get, and do it fast.
So check with your destination school FIRST to make sure they accept the credits you are about to earn. They may not be able to give you a solid (that is, written) answer prior to transferring, but it’s worth looking into. On the other hand, some large universities may be used to working with transfers from your school, in which case it may be easier to transfer credits.
Our final key point is to be aware that once you have transferred, your relationship with your first school will be substantially weaker than most alums. In some ways, you are a black mark on the roster, so if you need letters of recommendation for future interviews, you will want to secure them before you tell your profs you are going to leave, lest you plummet to the bottom of their priority list. It sounds harsh but in their eyes, if you aren’t a graduate, you’re a disgruntled customer.
For some students, transferring is the best option. A good reason to transfer is if you have a focused academic interest you have discovered since exploring courses your freshman year, and you realize that it requires a specialized degree or training you have to pursue elsewhere. At this point, your interest in this program is not the wishful speculation of high school but is based on genuine college performance, which will help guide the authenticity of your decision. This was the case with McKenzie. She transferred from her state university to Duke during her sophomore year once she realized her engineering passions were leaning heavily toward biomedical engineering, a specialty offered at the undergraduate level at very few universities. For her, transferring was a sound academic decision and worth the social costs.
We see another benefit of transferring in the case of Dean, who made a hash of his life as a freshman by getting into all manner of academic and relational disciplinary trouble. Dean had earned himself an unshakable bad-boy reputation and needed to reboot; he took some time off to do some minimum-wage soul searching, then transferred to a new school, where he would no longer be associated with his mistakes from freshman year. Certainly his transcript and disciplinary history shadowed him and limited what universities were willing to take him, but that was something his peers never needed to know; for him, that social break made all the difference.
The textbook case is the student who comes in totally immature and academically unprepared. He spends too much time at the frat parties hugging the keg and doesn’t realize how tough a final exam is, and at the end of his freshman year has less than a 1.0 average and the beginnings of an alcoholic dependency. A student of this ilk would benefit from taking his spring semester off in order to start fresh next year.
Another equally common reason is the student who, through no fault of her own, develops mono or some other illness in late September and misses a third of her classes. That student is probably better off taking a medical leave immediately and starting over in the spring or, better yet, the next fall with a batch of fresh classmates. A semester off for a major medical procedure is a no-brainer, and universities are very good at easing the transition so students can take as much time as they need. It is in everyone’s best interest to have that student take time off and restart at full capacity.
In the case of an ill family member or divorce, it depends. We covered this in an earlier chapter a bit more extensively. Ultimately, if you are unable to focus adequately on your studies, it may be best for you to take a leave. The key here is that you not reason it out alone. All universities have very elaborate counseling programs to help students figure out the right answer for them to precisely these questions, so make an appointment with the dean of students at the first sign of diagnosis or separation.
Other reasons to take a leave are similar opportunities we cited earlier for students who decide to take a gap year. It’s a fairly automatic right of return, but students will likely need to tell the school what they have been doing while they have been away.
Of course, there is one other big reason students withdraw. David took a leave from Stanford after his sophomore year to try his hand at a dream. He told us, “I took two years off during the initial dot-com flare to learn about start-ups—and to try to make my millions! It was one of the best things I’ve ever done. At one point, I lost direction at school because I was so enamored with the wider world. At the time, I was studying computer science, so when I left I used my education to see how programming is executed in the real world. By the time I got back to college, I had written hundreds of thousands of lines of code, had administered serious chunks of infrastructure, and knew that I loved everything about technology companies. As a result, when I returned I was intensely focused on the classes that mattered to me, and frankly I had a huge leg up on my classmates because I had already learned what they were just now learning in class.” Were there any downsides to David’s leave? Keep reading for part two of his story in the next section.
Should you decide to take a leave, discuss your options with your academic advisor or dean early on, as timing is key. With something unplannable, such as a medical leave of absence or personal trauma from the death of a close family member, the university is much more flexible in cutting through the restrictions.
Friendships, particularly in college, are a bit like sharks: they need to keep moving or they die. Among many opportunities in college, one is to develop intense friendships, but should you take a semester or more off, you will find those friendships are almost impossible to sustain if they are at college and you are not. Thus, one of the risks of taking leave is losing that close connection.
At the academic level, if you are pursuing a program that is heavily cumulative you risk losing momentum in your track. While you may be technically qualified to take third level Mandarin when you return, if you’ve been out for a semester, what you learned in second level Mandarin nine months ago will be fuzzy, at best.
One of the greatest risks, even with these two risks in mind, is that once students leave some don’t return. David, the Stanford alum who eventually took seven years to complete his undergrad degree, agrees: “The risks are pretty clear. I met many, many people in the dot-com world who advised me, ‘Whatever you do, GO BACK,’ because they had dropped out and never returned. It’s very hard to find a convenient time to return to college. You get hooked on making an awesome salary, and returning to paying and taking loans and making no money is pretty tough. There are lots of ways to get trapped in the real world, and it’s easy to come up with excuses to never return. If you take a leave, don’t make excuses. When you decide to return, do it no matter what the consequences.”
Whether you are leaving as the result of study abroad or a personal leave of absence, its best to anticipate a challenge in transitioning back to campus life. The challenge comes because both you and your friends have changed. If you used the time away wisely, you may have grown faster than your friends. Don’t be surprised if, upon returning, you discover you have lost interest in some of the campus activities you previously enjoyed and are more engaged with the world beyond your dorm.
This transitional culture is significant enough that many universities have developed a debriefing program so that students returning from abroad can talk with other students about their time away and develop a new community with the shared interest of travel. Some study-abroad students have told us they actually feel more like a foreigner returning to their home campus than they did as an actual foreigner studying internationally, and many are not prepared for that reverse culture shock.
In the event that your leave had nothing to do with study abroad, be aware that the university may not have an elaborate system in place to help you transition back to campus life. As opposed to study abroad, taking a leave of absence is not something the university promotes widely. However, should you return and feel at a loss, there is always someone at the counseling center to help you reconnect.
Some study-abroad students actually feel more like a foreigner returning to their home campus than they did as an actual foreigner studying internationally.
When we asked David about challenges he faced upon returning to Stanford, he agreed that his return was difficult: “That was really, really hard for me. When I came back, all of my friends had graduated. I had to start over, and the best way to do that seemed to be that I join a co-op where we cooked and lived together. It felt really weird to be a part of this at twenty-five when everyone else was nineteen or twenty. By the end of the first semester, I knew everyone in our co-op and they elected me to an officer position, so I felt like I was able to make a home for myself there.”
The best advice we can give you upon returning is to be realistic. The university has changed—as have you. Try not to panic if campus doesn’t feel like home for a little while, and stick with it.
Study abroad is very much a luxury item. It’s like traveling internationally in business class—you all reach the same destination, but it can significantly improve your journey. Study abroad is particularly great for American students who, as a general rule, have less of a global perspective and yet are forced to operate in a world that is very globalized. If you’ve never been out of your suburb in the Midwest and you are going to school in a suburb in the South, you might really benefit from studying overseas for a semester, assuming you can afford it. However, if you are on a tight budget, study abroad is by no means a necessary thing. The world is filled with great leaders who are changing the world but didn’t study abroad.
As you debate with yourself (and maybe your parents) the value of study abroad, our advice is to only do it if you can afford it comfortably. We find that the quality of the classroom and professor-interaction experience is actually weaker abroad, and you may experience the loss of other opportunities, such as losing touch with those professor relationships you were working so hard to forge back home, or a weakened involvement in clubs where you may have been seeking leadership positions. These are harder to pursue if you disappear for a semester (or two, once you add in summer as well).
If the decision is a close call financially, you can gain a lot of the study-abroad experience by doing internships in the summer at the State Department or a business internship in another country. If you can’t afford study abroad, you might be able to afford travel or living abroad. You will learn a lot living on noodles while you backpack all over Asia, and it is significantly cheaper because you are only paying living expenses, not tuition. If you go the backpacking route, another perk is that you don’t have to spend your free time in the library writing papers about Thailand—you can study the rock formations of Koh Phi Phi while you snorkel instead.
So when is it worth the cost and time? If your career goals require fluency in Vietnamese, that will be hard for you to get taking classes four years stateside. There is no better way to learn than immersion, and a semester in Vietnam will help you enormously. The feedback we get from students and their parents is generally that the study-abroad experience is priceless if international travel is a new opportunity, and it tends to be worth a little less when a student has traveled abroad a lot already. That being said, we’ve yet to meet a student who says their study-abroad program wasn’t worth it.
We have, however, met many who said their study-abroad courses weren’t worth much. Many programs out there are not academically rigorous, nor are they the luxury dining and lodging experience you might be expecting. (Yes, clean sheets are considered a luxury in many places.) Some students are surprised when they experience that; others are delighted, particularly about the lighter academics. It goes without saying (but we’ll say it anyway) that if you are about to hand over a significant chunk of change, you must research the program well. If the program is offered by your university, it is probably acceptable and will likely earn you credit, but even then the academic value is uncertain. Just like we advised you in chapter 3 about course selection, you will want to ask peers for pointed feedback about their programs, and make a special note of when they took them since programs (not to mention countries) change rapidly.
Start your research with a program within the university. It is likely that if your university recommends it, it is prepared to give you full academic credit for the courses you take overseas. Note that we said “likely.” You’ll want to double check that with your academic counseling center beforehand, of course. The beauty of using a program endorsed by your university is that it is already prepackaged for you, and will require significantly less planning and legwork on your part.
Once you’ve pared down your course load, be sure to select courses with significant amounts of history, art, and religion that will enable you to get a slightly different perspective of the material as you travel through the country than you might if you were studying it in the US. There is nothing quite like having an art class in the Louvre and getting to see Mona Lisa’s sfumato up close.
Nick—recent grad, Point Loma Nazarene U
Perhaps your university doesn’t offer study-abroad programs, or, at least, none that are of interest to you. If that is the case, look at programs that other schools similar to yours have approved, even though your school may not yet fully embrace it. Be aware that there are all kinds of transaction costs with using a program your university hasn’t officially preapproved; it’s also possible that courses from another university may not transfer to yours.
A less common but still plausible scenario is that, for whatever reason, you are unable to find any program for study overseas that offers what you’re looking for. If that is the case, approach this warily (and be prepared to invest a considerable amount of time in the research of something that may possibly prove futile).
There are significant transaction costs associated with blazing your own academic trail overseas, especially if you expect your home university to give you full academic credit. For most students, it isn’t worth the time. However, if your career goals require you to learn Urdu and no programs offer classes in Pakistan, you will need to create a program on your own. Perhaps you want to study there because you have a strong cultural connection, such as family there who can provide housing for you and perhaps lighten your logistical load. Sure. For the sake of your own identity formation, it may be worth the extra effort at this stage in your academic career and developmental trajectory to dive head first into your heritage. Recognize, though, that your university may be less willing to endorse study overseas from institutions that are unfamiliar, especially if they believe your presence in that country may expose you to unnecessary risk of harm.
A weighty alternative to study abroad is a domestic study-away program. Many universities now offer programs domestically where students can study on Wall Street for a semester, study in New York in the arts for theater production, pursue film and video in Los Angeles, study politics in Washington DC, and, essentially, find a way to respond to a particular interest of study in a format that is more academic than a typical internship. (Although, now instead of working for free as with an internship, you will be paying to work; but a lot of learning takes place and many students have told us that the time spent studying away from campus breathed life into their studies once they returned.) Depending on the program, it might also be open to students from other schools, which broadens your education further.
As a general rule study abroad should NOT be used to discover your path; it should be part of the path you’ve already chosen.
Whatever you do, we generally recommend avoiding programs that don’t give you college credit. If you are going to travel, travel. If you are going to study, study. But don’t study-travel and have nothing to show for it on your transcripts.
Traveling abroad is expensive. Make sure you have more than enough money in your bank account when you leave so that you can live comfortably, and approach a few financially savvy folks on campus and in your study-abroad program ahead of time to ask what a moderate budget might look like. Keep in mind that eating can be a cultural experience too, and only having money for a baguette and a block of cheese every day will really limit your experience.
Nick—recent grad, Point Loma Nazarene
Yes. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that science and engineering majors, where the precise content and sequence of the course matters significantly, don’t complement study-abroad programs. Premed is slightly easier than engineering, but it’s still a challenge. Your best bet might be to go during the summer when it won’t interrupt the normal course sequence.
The best time for study abroad is spring of your sophomore year. Second to that, and slightly more debatable, is fall of your junior year.
The reasons are these: Freshman year should be devoted to navigating your home institution, developing healthy habits of independence as a fledgling undergrad, and getting a solid lock on your social network for your graduating class. Interrupting this season of development could be socially catastrophic later on, leaving you feeling very un-at-home on your home campus.
Junior and senior year you will likely be taking your most challenging courses for your major, and you’ll want to take those at home where professors can write letters of recommendation. Spring of your junior year (and anytime thereafter) is not ideal timing, given that your job search begins in the fall of your senior year and so is parlaying your junior year transcript. The more advanced courses graded at your home institution the better, since most employers will know that study abroad, academically speaking, is second tier and won’t be impressed by study-abroad grades. And that’s assuming you get good grades. Should you get caught up in the grandeur of travel and lose sight of your GPA, it would be incredibly difficult to explain the poor quality of your most recent grades to the professional interviewing you.
It makes the most sense to go abroad once you’ve figured out your major and a general plan of how that moves you toward your future career. Put differently, as a general rule study abroad should NOT be used to discover your path; it should be part of the path you’ve already chosen.
The good news in all this stringency is that grad reqs do not need to be out of the way before going—you can still leave some of those for your senior year as we advised in an earlier chapter. Be wary, however, about study abroad if you are significantly behind pace, because study abroad will oftentimes slow your momentum.
I recommend cutting your course load in half and certainly taking no more than three-quarters of a typical load while studying abroad. There is so much culture to soak in and so many other opportunities for learning outside the classroom that it is a shame to waste that time on your hostel bunk, studying. This is true particularly if you decide to go the route of a sampler tour across a series of countries, where you are constantly relocating and need to exchange your money, clean your laundry, and buy an inexpensive meal in every new city you reach. Traveling becomes a full-time job in that instance, and the last thing you want to have to do when you arrive in Rome is post up in a dingy Laundromat and study for a midterm.
Nick—recent grad, Point Loma Nazarene U
Courses. It’s a mistake to take courses that are vastly better taught at your home institution, where the star prof in the subject may be teaching. Save the course for when you return home rather than studying with Dr. Vatsisname, who is a visiting lecturer in Barcelona. It’s better to take courses while abroad that are not offered at your school; you will be able to take advantage of the cross-cultural dimension. Medieval Spanish poetry might be much better taught and far more fascinating on its home turf than at your home institution.
$$$$. Three thousand dollars may sound like a lot of money, but once you begin your travels you’ll come to realize just how little that will buy. Too frequently we hear of students who miscalculated the cost of living and ended up eating a lot of white rice for a semester because they didn’t budget enough for—and all the incidentals that come with—travel.
Dating. Ah, the allure of the Latin lover. Enticing as those stories may be, use caution in pursuing any kind of relationship while studying abroad. We find that students are frequently naive or far too trusting about the intent of romantic flings in other countries. Too many wind up heartbroken, conned out of their money, or worse. Tourists are common prey, and you will be living as such 24/7 for a semester; a healthy dose of suspicion will serve you well at this juncture.
Laws. Know the laws. Just because it’s legal in the States does not make it legal overseas. You really don’t want to get involved in a drug arrest in certain countries; trust us on that one. Unfortunately it happens frequently enough for us to mention it. There are other legal questions to know ahead of time around driver’s licenses and such, so query the host of your program ahead of time.
Conduct. Most study-abroad programs are not tolerant of misbehavior. They consider their program a privilege and are more inclined to discipline harshly and send you home on a first offense than if you exhibited that same behavior at your home school.
Safety. Students tend to be optimistic and hopeful about their safety in other countries—too optimistic. We have known students who have been robbed, beaten, and sexually assaulted while overseas. So please … keep your street smarts on you at all times.
It’s worth ending on a positive note with this section. We’ve given study abroad a bit of a sandpaper treatment in this chapter, but that’s only because we’ve seen so many students enter into the opportunity expecting a vacation and giving less than their best. We’ve also heard countless stories from students about how study abroad had a major impact on their perspective of the world and their place in it, so we know it can be a valuable experience. In fact, some universities are beginning to augment their programs to include a service-learning component to give a full flavor of a country beyond the typical tourist icons. Universities overseas are investing heavily in their programming to attract students such as you, and there are many exciting, interesting, attractive, worthwhile programs worth looking into. (Do all those adjectives make us seem jealous? Well, maybe we are a bit.) Even with all the fantastic course titles the programs offer, it is less about the academics and more about the experience; if the experience is worth the payoff, go.
Invest the time to write in your journal every night before bed—what you saw, what you imagined, what you think you’ll always remember—because you likely won’t remember. It will all be a blur before the decade is out and having journals to complement those piles of jpgs will be incredibly valuable to you later on. Oh, and be sure to buy a waterproof pen: you’d just hate to put in all that time writing and then have someone spill his Nalgene water over your tireless work.
Nick—recent grad, Point Loma Nazarene
Bill Gates. Next question? No, we’re kidding. There’s a lot more to it than that (though you’d be surprised how many students cite him as some sort of guarantee that dropping out equals making billions). Gates proves dropping out isn’t a fatal wound in every case, but not everyone is Bill Gates.
If you’re going to drop out, it is better to do so sooner rather than later, because you’ll have less college debt; in other words, spend less on a degree you don’t plan on earning, because a partial college degree is worth less than you think. There is a real benefit to discovering college is not for you before you get too far into it, and that is part of the reason we recommend a gap year—to take that pause and gain some perspective. Should you take a gap year or a semester’s leave, you may discover you have a passion for a trade that doesn’t require a college degree. Without electricians or plumbers, we’d all be sitting in the dark or perhaps something much worse. It’s better for you to discover that you are a tradesperson at heart before you sink a lot of money into a degree you won’t need.
That being said, because the value of an unfinished education is low, if you are at the three-year mark, it is better to just finish. You will reach a point where even limping across the finish line is better than not finishing at all. The economist may argue against seeking to recoup sunk costs, but in this case we think it makes more sense. Once you’re through the tunnel far enough, it’s best to keep going.
Should you decide you want to withdraw, try to do so while you are still in good standing with the university. Whether you withdraw and never come back, try to return to the school later, or transfer, you are always best leaving while your grades are somewhat decent. And honestly, that’s the hardest thing to do because optimistic undergrads want to believe they can turn it around. Your dean of students is the best resource for this conversation.
A bad reason to drop out would be to get married. Seriously, it happens. Certainly being married as an undergraduate changes the college experience, but it doesn’t require dropping out. On the downside, married undergrads find it to be socially ostracizing: they miss out on dorm life and campus interactions, they don’t attend events like they thought they would, and, all said, it cuts their student experience short. That’s not to say getting married while an undergrad is a mistake—marriage is its own classroom on life. The upside of getting married while you are in school is that you grow up together, travel together, and experience more of life together. That slice of life is simply bigger because it starts earlier; it doesn’t mean the end of life and freedom as you know it. One of us has been married for twelve years and got married in college; another of us has been married for twenty years and got married after college—we’re big proponents of marriage. You can make the timing of getting married work either way—just don’t drop the college part.
Should you be thinking of dropping out so you can pursue your lifelong ambition of becoming the next Shawn White, think again. We know of one such character, CJ, who is a professional racer of sorts. He could have easily dropped out along the way and used his racing career as a reasonable excuse, but instead he has been flexible and smart about his academic choices and his racing schedule, and he has been diligent in his conversations with his professors so that they’ve all been able to make it work. Shiny gold medal to CJ.
Speaking of gold medals (seamless transition, right?), what if you want to become an Olympic-quality skier? We know of a young woman named Amber who has that as her ambition. Her big training will take place spring semester, so she scheduled a heavier load fall semester and a lighter load spring semester, with classes Tuesday through Thursday in the spring so she can travel on the weekends. We include these reallife anecdotes if only to say that pursuing your dreams qualifies as an unnecessary (aka, bad) reason to drop out of college.
If you are doing well in school and enjoying it, there are ways to make the system work with you, even if you are trying to pursue a fairly extensive activity on the side. Put forth the effort to see how your university can work with you before simply dropping out. Your university will likely be eager and honored to find a way for you to remain their student while achieving your goals.
Of course, if dropping out of college is your way of avoiding growing up, that would also qualify as a bad reason. If you don’t like the idea of waking up before 10 a.m. to go to class, don’t like being held accountable for your performance, or have a penchant for laziness, dropping out of college will only magnify your problems. Maybe you are a hard worker but you have low self-esteem, thinking you are a loser and will fail anyway; rather than work on that with a counselor on campus, you take the path of least resistance and prove yourself right. Yup, that would be another bad reason. If dropping out is a way to avoid dealing with a deeper, underlying character issue, it will only make your life more difficult than if you face that character flaw head-on and use the support systems your university offers in mass quantities to help refine your perspective of yourself and your place in the world.
Our society increasingly privileges college degrees, and the economic opportunities for those without them are significantly less today than they were fifty years ago, especially with jobs being farmed out overseas. Should you decide to drop out, you could fall through the cracks of society in a hurry. The mistake in all this, of course, is not having problems—we all have them—but rather not addressing those problems. Staying enrolled will give you access to resources tailor-made for people your age with the challenges you face.
Again, we find that popular culture likes to cite Bill Gates—his story is the dream of every Tevye (“If I were a rich man …”). The truth of the matter is that someone with Gates’s drive and ability would have excelled even if he had finished college and exited via the time-honored door instead of the window. The key to his success was not dropping out; it was developing an idea so powerful that it didn’t require a college degree. There are reasons why there are a lot of dropouts but only one Bill Gates.
Okay, but doesn’t it seem like a lot of Internet billionaires dropped out of college to start companies like Microsoft and Google and Yahoo and yadda yadda? Yes, but what was the common denominator in their stories? They met people at college, and it was those partnerships and collaborations that took them to success. Very few dot-com successes are solo acts. Part of what you’re buying at your university is valuable interactions and networks. Facebook. Pandora. These are all the products of interactions and brainstorming with other bright people, which is a pretty good working definition of what college is or should be about.