Reflective Essay on Personal Experience of Gap Year

Within theme 2 I was especially drawn and interested to the lecture were we examined the ‘Gap Year’. Having been one of the many modern-day students that have taken part in a gap year, it was intriguing to understand how a ‘simple’ year away from previous structures such as university began and has advanced into such a modern-day phenomenon. The Gap year began as the ‘Grand Tour’ fashioned within the Victorian period (Heath 2007). During this period this tour was seen as an educational exploration over an extended period of time designed to affiliate education and travel to broaden the traveller's mind and mature them as a person (Brodsky-Porges, 1981). This grand tour has since evolved into the gap year, which is a formal period of time were a person postpones study and current employment to travel or develop personal skills and experiences (Millington, 2005). Despite participation in a gap year being allowed at any time across the lifespan, the general timeframe for people to take a gap year out has been most popular after completing secondary education and at any point within higher tertiary study periods (O’Reilly 2006). However, despite the gap year becoming progressively more popular with people in developed cities and stable backgrounds, it must still be noted they are still not popular or have a common place among less privileged groups within communities. (Jones, 2004; Cremin, 2007; Heath, 2007; Stehlik, 2010).

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(Holmlund et al, 2008) identified four different varieties of gap years which are relevant to our situation in the UK: “1) gaps as investments in skills; 2) gaps as waiting for better educational opportunities; 3) gaps as learning about one's preferences and/or ability; 4) gaps as leisure.” These four points are crucial in understanding the expansion of the term and how in a transnational world options such as these points become possible for instance to potentially go to education chances abroad, to travel to far countries such as Australia were one would have originally thought they would never be able to see and lastly to take that year and take a break from normal life to regroup and structure the next steps of the life plan. (Heath, 2007) portrays the gap year as a method for students to improve on CVs to gain an employability ‘edge’ over fellow students. Furthermore (Cremin, 2007) reports that there is a growing amount of companies that support the idea of a gap year and that the common factor across all of these companies was that the gap year symbolized fortified employability as a unique selling point. From my own personal opinion, I feel these are the most relevant points into why I chose to do my gap year as a working placement in industry. When gap year got mentioned to me at university the first thing that crossed my mind was an extra qualification for my CV. I believe this is simply down to how the modern-day student is conditioned from having to have the perfect UCAS application in school to having to have the best degree classification to being the most stand out on paper to the rest of the room when it comes to a CV. This point I am making is supported by (Holdsworth, 2015) who demonstrated that modern-day growth in gap years is in complete correlation with the rise of wealth of experience constraining students to portray individual employability. Therefore when we learned and reflected in class on the development of the gap year I am not surprised how it has turned from an exciting adventure of exploration to develop the creativity of the young mind to being a stigma in every modern-day young student's mind that it is a necessity and must be done in order to stand out from the crowd and give that extra step. However, despite having completed a full gap year I can truly say I have no regrets from completing it and it was one of the most unique and exciting experiences I have taken part in so far throughout my life.

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