Ask YC: Gap year ideas?
I am graduating high school early and am looking for cool ways to spend my time before college. I am looking to do some combination work/intern, travel and educational programs. What activities do you think I can get the most out of during a gap year?
4 comments
After high school and before college, I spent half of a year in Beijing learning Chinese and the other half in Palo Alto working at a Web startup. (It sounds like a cliché now.) This was three years ago. I'm really glad I did what I did, but there were many things I learned during and afterward that would have helped me a lot. A lot of my friends who deferred college for a year don't consider it a good choice, so it's not a given that you will enjoy it.
My recommendations:
- Leave home.
- Spend only your own money. Don't ask or let your parents pay for a single cent. If possible. (But stay on their health insurance.)
- Make your own plans. If you're traveling, don't sign up for "packages" offered by American (or whatever your home country is) tour companies. Get an airline ticket on your own and correspond with local tour agencies, local universities, etc., on your own.
- If you have to spend your parents' money or get your plans approved by them, then do your best to persuade them to give you as much freedom as possible, and take as little money as you need.
- Embrace your freedom. If you're traveling, don't overplan. Leave room to take a trip to another city with people you meet or to abruptly decide you want to go somewhere else or do something else.
- If you're looking for a job, people will try to take advantage of you. Don't underestimate the value you provide. Don't sell yourself short.
- Asia is cheap, safe, and fun. South America, Africa, and the Middle East aren't safe. Europe and Australia aren't cheap. And the US isn't quite as fun (for people who grew up there like me). Those generalizations are what led me to go to China, and I think they still hold (relatively) true.
I see from your post history that you don't program. If you're interested in the tech (and tech business) world, which I think you are, then you will be missing out on 99% of it unless you learn to program. I would recommend you figure out what environment would be most conducive to you learning to program, and then put yourself in that environment for the next 10 months. It's that important. Then travel or something for the next two months.
My email is in my profile.
My recommendations:
- Leave home.
- Spend only your own money. Don't ask or let your parents pay for a single cent. If possible. (But stay on their health insurance.)
- Make your own plans. If you're traveling, don't sign up for "packages" offered by American (or whatever your home country is) tour companies. Get an airline ticket on your own and correspond with local tour agencies, local universities, etc., on your own.
- If you have to spend your parents' money or get your plans approved by them, then do your best to persuade them to give you as much freedom as possible, and take as little money as you need.
- Embrace your freedom. If you're traveling, don't overplan. Leave room to take a trip to another city with people you meet or to abruptly decide you want to go somewhere else or do something else.
- If you're looking for a job, people will try to take advantage of you. Don't underestimate the value you provide. Don't sell yourself short.
- Asia is cheap, safe, and fun. South America, Africa, and the Middle East aren't safe. Europe and Australia aren't cheap. And the US isn't quite as fun (for people who grew up there like me). Those generalizations are what led me to go to China, and I think they still hold (relatively) true.
I see from your post history that you don't program. If you're interested in the tech (and tech business) world, which I think you are, then you will be missing out on 99% of it unless you learn to program. I would recommend you figure out what environment would be most conducive to you learning to program, and then put yourself in that environment for the next 10 months. It's that important. Then travel or something for the next two months.
My email is in my profile.
You didn't mention where you are from, you might be able to mix a few of these things together.
If you're from the US, how about work/intern at a start-up (assuming you're into that since you're on HN) in Europe or Asia?
There are 'working holiday visas' which will allow you to work while you are traveling in certain countries.
There are 'working holiday visas' which will allow you to work while you are traveling in certain countries.
Start off by looking into where your future college will matriculate credit from. If you're going to school, you absolutely don't want to waste any more time/money than necessary in your general requirements. Most 100/200 level classes in university don't offer you much intellectual bang for your buck. If you could do one semester of community college and one summer term for $5,000 total and knock out 3-4 semesters of high priced boredom inducing garbage general requirement classes, you've got to look into it.
Travel's good and builds the hell out of your wisdom and character. You'll get lots of great business ideas from traveling too. There's two schools of thought: Spend less time (4 days to a week) in a bunch of countries to see which you like and see the major attractions, or spend more time in one or two places going for immersion to really deeply learn about the place. I've done both - I "quick travel" through parts of the world that I'm not sure if I'll like (rapidly did most of Europe), and went for more immersion in China and Spain. Japan I passed through on the way to China and fell in love with it, and have been back a number of times.
If you travel, I'd say think about picking up some skills instead of just doing tourist stuff. Tourist stuff gets boring. Learning another language, a martial art, or some kind of craft that's big locally could be great times.
Working is good, and I know internships aren't such a popular idea on HN, but I interned at my local statehouse for a while between semesters at university and it was blast. Seeing how government really runs to some extent was pretty eye-opening. (It's even more corrupt than you'd expect, but everyone's really nice and friendly)
What I'd recommend against: Staying in your home area without a really filled schedule. Because all of your free time is likely to be sunk into whatever you currently do to waste time (so... maybe XBox and Hacker News? Just guessin'). No matter how much you tell yourself you'll read a ton of books, plant trees, go jogging 10 miles a day - you probably won't if you stay on your home turf. You're likely to read more books, jog more, and plant more trees in foreign countries, at least in my experience. If you do decide to stick around wherever you're at, I'd say almost overschedule yourself - some of the most fun I ever had (in retrospect) was when I was running a company full time out of Boston, building a startup in NYC, taking full time courses in project management, and sometimes traveling for work on the weekends to other cities in North America. Maybe 100 hours of my life were booked from the start of the week, but I still had plenty of free time.
For whatever reason, being busy always seemed to mean I had more free time: Anyone I wanted to see would always work hard to schedule me into the limited time I had available because I was so scarce, I was never bored, and I realized how precious my own time was so I did plenty of gym-going and reading too. Great times.
Travel's good and builds the hell out of your wisdom and character. You'll get lots of great business ideas from traveling too. There's two schools of thought: Spend less time (4 days to a week) in a bunch of countries to see which you like and see the major attractions, or spend more time in one or two places going for immersion to really deeply learn about the place. I've done both - I "quick travel" through parts of the world that I'm not sure if I'll like (rapidly did most of Europe), and went for more immersion in China and Spain. Japan I passed through on the way to China and fell in love with it, and have been back a number of times.
If you travel, I'd say think about picking up some skills instead of just doing tourist stuff. Tourist stuff gets boring. Learning another language, a martial art, or some kind of craft that's big locally could be great times.
Working is good, and I know internships aren't such a popular idea on HN, but I interned at my local statehouse for a while between semesters at university and it was blast. Seeing how government really runs to some extent was pretty eye-opening. (It's even more corrupt than you'd expect, but everyone's really nice and friendly)
What I'd recommend against: Staying in your home area without a really filled schedule. Because all of your free time is likely to be sunk into whatever you currently do to waste time (so... maybe XBox and Hacker News? Just guessin'). No matter how much you tell yourself you'll read a ton of books, plant trees, go jogging 10 miles a day - you probably won't if you stay on your home turf. You're likely to read more books, jog more, and plant more trees in foreign countries, at least in my experience. If you do decide to stick around wherever you're at, I'd say almost overschedule yourself - some of the most fun I ever had (in retrospect) was when I was running a company full time out of Boston, building a startup in NYC, taking full time courses in project management, and sometimes traveling for work on the weekends to other cities in North America. Maybe 100 hours of my life were booked from the start of the week, but I still had plenty of free time.
For whatever reason, being busy always seemed to mean I had more free time: Anyone I wanted to see would always work hard to schedule me into the limited time I had available because I was so scarce, I was never bored, and I realized how precious my own time was so I did plenty of gym-going and reading too. Great times.
WWOOFing