‘Gap years’ offer teens service, travel — and transformation
By Sharon Noguchi For 13 years, Isabel Garcia, of Redwood City, hit the books and was poised to become the first in her immigrant family to go to college. Then instead she decided to spend a year in Brazil as an unpaid apprentice and was met with bewilderment. “You’re in America, it’s perfect here, […]
Vision + Strategy
Entrepreneur and educator Abby Falik is on a crusade to make a global bridge year post-high school the norm. Story by Amalia McGibbon What is the point of college? It’s a genuine question. With a third of American freshman dropping out before their second year, student debt on the rise, and employers […]
Abby Falik says go find yourself! And she can help
Inflection Point is a public radio show dedicated to telling the stories of women changing the status quo. We’re thrilled to share this week’s podcast featuring Abby Falik, Global Citizen Year’s Founder/CEO. Abby talks with host Lauren Schiller about the crisis facing our outdated education system, and shines a light on a promising solution: a new pathway […]
You Should Know: Abby Falik
A well-known educator and activist, Abby Falik is the founder and CEO of Global Citizen Year, which works to take the concept of a global bridge year after high school and turn it into a more commonly experienced expectation and opportunity. Occupation: Social Entrepreneur Place of birth: Berkeley, CA Instagram/Twitter: @abbyfalik […]
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 […]
