Bridge-year program to make a bigger Jewish splash

by Patricia Corrigan , j. correspondent   When Abby Falik graduated from high school in 1997, the Berkeley teen wanted “to do something in the world” — to provide some type of humanitarian service — before heading off to college. But no such program was available. Today there is, and Falik started it.   Abby […]

Here’s How to Make a Gap Year Before College Count

Joe O’Shea is the author of Gap Year: How Delaying College Changes People in Ways the World Needs, President of the Board of the American Gap Association, and Director of Undergraduate Research and Academic Engagement at Florida State University.   American students are taking gap years at record numbers. Over the next three months, many high […]

A Year Off Before College Isn’t A Gap, It’s A Launching Pad

By Denise Restauri   In August 2012, my daughter Ally was in India, spending the first half of her gap year at Shanti Bhavan, a boarding school for the most vulnerable children of India’s “lowest caste.” After five months at Shanti Bhavan, Ally would head off to Nepal to join (then 25-year-old) Maggie Doynewho runs a […]

Abby Falik selected as one of the 10 Young Women to Watch for in 2014

When Abigail Falik graduated from high school, she dreamed of joining the Peace Corps but got the standard response: “Go to college first.” Frustrated but determined, Falik cobbled together a trip to Nicaragua, where she lived with a family in a rural community and learned to make tortillas by hand. She worked in the fields, […]

Time Out: The Value Of A Gap Year

After 13 years, 117 months and approximately 2,350 days of continuous school, Lindsay felt she needed a break. Instead of heading directly for her freshman year at a prestigious upstate New York college, she decided to take a gap year and packed her bags for India. There, she learned Tamil while helping to bring solar […]

‘Global Citizen’ Gap Year Program Leads To More Success In College

For UCLA student Mai Lee, a gap year program between high school and college proved to be instrumental in determining her academic trajectory. “My values have shifted,” she recalled to HuffPost Live’s Jordan Freeman of her year living in a 2,000-person village in Senegal. “My interests have shifted, and during my experience through working through apprenticeships, I realized […]

Give and Go

What Global Citizen Year offers requires more than travel. Participants spend a year with a family in a rural area of Africa or Latin America. The program is designed for students as a bridge year between high school and college. Those who are accepted must raise $2,500 from commitments in their own community, and then […]

Go West, Young People! And East!

I’M delighted to announce that the winner of my 2014 “win-a-trip” contest is … Oh, hang on. Maybe I should first exhort students to travel on their own — and cite Utah. Utah may well be the most cosmopolitan state in America. Vast numbers of young Mormons — increasingly women as well as men — […]

Tufts University Offers Financial Aid for Students’ Year Off

BOSTON — Tufts University will launch a program next autumn to help cash-strapped students take a year off to travel and perform public service before starting their undergraduate classes. The program puts Massachusetts-based Tufts among a handful of American colleges offering to pay for a ‘gap year’ to explore the world and absorb different cultures […]

Seeing Value in ‘Gap Years,’ Tufts University Offers to Pay

By Zach Schonfeld   When Gregory Kristoff graduated high school in 2010, he opted not to start college immediately. Instead, he spent the better part of a year studying Chinese in Beijing and then Dalian, China. Then he went to Peru — and then, after a full year of such gallivanting, he began his freshman year at Harvard. […]