As many high school seniors are overjoyed at their college acceptances, packing their bags, looking at books, and anticipating graduation, a high school senior, Celia Hough, is taking another route. Instead of frantically studying for AP exams, making a college deposit, and beginning the teary bittersweet good-byes, Celia Hough has been calling restaurants, skylining companies, and various of other work places in Colorado for employment before the Americorps. Instead of paying her college deposit, Celia has been buying a plane ticket, a durable backpack, and a thermos to prepare her for the Americorps.
Taking a year off--or in Celia’s case, possibly many years off-- between high school and college goes against the modern American norm. It is expected and encouraged for high school seniors to go to a college in order to prepare for the future. There is a certain stigma associated with students who do not go to a four year college, but instead decide to take a year off between high school and college to find themselves or figure out their passions. Despite the stigma, gap years have been on a rise, and studies have shown that gap year students benefit in the long run. According to the American Gap Year Association, enrollment of gap year programs grew 27 percent from 2012 to 2013 alone. Research indicates, students who take gap years are happier with their jobs, more mature, and more empathetic than their non-gap peers. Prestigious colleges such as Harvard, Yale, and Middlebury encourage students to defer for a gap year if they can give the school an outline of how they plan to spend their year.
Middlebury found that students who take gap years consistently have higher GPAs (averaging between .1 and .4) than their gap free peers. Harvard wrote underneath an article in Admissions titular Should I Take Time Off? where they “encourage admitted students to defer enrollment for one year to travel, pursue a project or activity, work, or spend time in another meaningful way.” The school later went on to explain the benefits of taking time off before college to avoid what Harvard calls the “burnout phenomenon.” Nicholas Kristof, a two time Pulitzer Prize winner, a New York Times columnist, and a Harvard and Oxford graduate, has been on the forefront of encouraging students to take gap years before college.
“ I slept on the floor of Indian temples and rode on the tops of Sudanese trains, and the experiences changed me by opening my eyes to human needs and to human universals,” Kristof wrote in his article, Go West, Young People!, “Colleges tend to love it when students defer admission to take a gap year because those students arrive with more maturity and less propensity to spend freshman year in an alcoholic haze.”
Molly Lister, a producer from CNN, and graduate from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, explained her gap year as, “My gap year was challenging and confusing, invigorating and tiring, thrilling and scary.”
Lister later elucidated in her blog post, “‘I have come to the realization that we live in a very strange paradox: we know so much about the world but most of what we know we see through someone else’s eyes. We see through the eyes of a journalist, a teacher, a textbook, an author, a director, and even sometimes a regular old 19-year old from NYC taking a year to travel before heading to college…But I leave you with this to ponder over: that if you think you understand the world, then maybe you haven’t seen enough of it with your own eyes’.”
AmeriCorps is a network of local, state, and national service programs that connects over 70,000 Americans each year in intensive service to meet community needs in education, the environment, public safety, health, and homeland security. AmeriCorps’s members serve with more than 2,000 non-profits, public agencies, and community organizations. Members can serve in full or part-time positions over a ten to twelve month period.
When asked, “Why did you decide to take time off and go into the Americorps?” Hough replied,“I have some vague interests. I like to run and make jewelry, but it is nothing that I can base a major off of. I want to learn languages, but I don’t know which one. I don’t know which one would be helpful for me. I think the issue was I didn’t want to waste $200,000 on college and waste all that time on something I wasn’t interested in just so I could eventually do what I want to do. I want to do what I want to do now. I don’t care about impressing other people. I don’t have my entire life worked out, but right now I want to go into the Americorps and help people.”
Are there any finances involved?
“Of course if you’re just going on vacation for a year, it’s going to cost some money, but it depends on what you want to do. If you want to go to the Americorps, you do get paid. Each person gets a small stipend along with room and board. You also get a $5,000 education grant at the end if you want to go to college,” replied Hough.
Hough described her biggest financial challenge was getting a job and place in Colorado at the age of seventeen before the Americorps started, but at the end she was still able to find a suitable job at a ziplining company with a place to stay. She plans to use her saved money to backpack after the Americorps.
The biggest challenge for Hough was not financial, but the amount of research and limited resources available. Hough spent countless of hours on the Americorps site, looking at the requirements, term length, and alumni-all common knowledge for people going into college. The hardest challenge for her was looking for an alumni in order to get a first-hand description of what the Americorps was really about.
“ To this day, I still do not know a single person who did any of the Americorps programs. I eventually did talk to my mom’s friend’s friend’s son’s girlfriend on the phone for four minutes. It turns out she did the Americorps in 2006. My substitute teacher I had once in sociology had a friend in high school who went to the Americorps in the 80s. That was about as much as I knew as far as alumni went. It’s sad because it’s really a great thing. I had to do all the research on my own, but I did it because I was very determined.”
  Kristof worked on a farm in Lyon, France.  Lister coached soccer in Costa Rica, worked on an Ecuadorian farm, backpacked through the Himalayas through India, taught English and lived in an orphanage in Ethiopia, lived in a Libertarian settlement camp in Ghana, taught English in central Uganda, and ended her year living at a school for the mentally and physically disabled children in northern Uganda. Celia Hough is going to the National Civilian Community Corps program in the Americorps where she would be traveling every four weeks serving disadvantaged American communities in the southwest.  A meaningful gap year debunks the myth of high school graduates becoming couch potatoes. At the very least, Hough will not be spending extravagant funds in college on an ambiguous degree, but instead, aiding poverty-stricken children and adults who are already behind the starting line from accidents of birth and geography.
There is no shame in pursuing a higher education, but when there are little alternatives other than pursuing a higher education, students should ask themselves, “Why?” Hough stated she would like to begin offering her support by supplying her email to any future readers interested in asking her about the Americorps.