Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz

Author:William Deresiewicz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

Of all the questions students ask me, the most common is also the hardest. It is some version of “So what should I do?”: where should I go to school? what should I study? which direction should I go in afterward? Of course, these aren’t the kinds of questions I or anybody else can answer, though I certainly understand the feeling of wishing that somebody could. The only concrete suggestion I can offer is one that you’ve already heard: Take time off. Take time off to slow down, to give yourself perspective, to break the cycle of incessant achievement, to get away from constant supervision, to see that there’s a world outside of school, to develop skills and explore capacities you haven’t had a chance to cultivate.

Take time off before you go to college. So-called gap year or bridge year programs are increasingly popular and increasingly encouraged. Harvard, Tufts, and NYU are now among the schools that suggest the option right in their admissions letters. Princeton has started a program of its own. Especially given the problems that more and more students are having adjusting to college, schools want kids who’ve had a chance to do some maturation. New programs are being started all the time, and there are websites and gap year fairs that can help you sort through them. (There are many shorter options, too, but the last thing you should do is try to cram in lots of little ones—another iteration of the hyper-distractible, resume-stuffing mentality.) Cost, of course, is an issue, but parents should consider that money spent preparing their kids to get the most out of college will help them to avoid wasting the money they’re already planning to spend on college. I was prevented from doing the gap year program that all my closest friends were going on because my father was worried that it would “knock me off my path.” The result was a failed college experience and a much longer detour later.

But you should also consider taking a gap year, without the “program” part. Too much structure is among the things you need to get away from—and so is the notion of being “productive.” “Take a year on,” a lot of these programs say: that is, keep enriching yourself in approved ways (go abroad and learn a language, etc.), ways that ultimately feed back into the achievement game. How about not enriching yourself for a change? How about doing something that you can’t put on your resume (or brag about on Facebook)? How about just wandering, literally or metaphorically, or holing up and reading somewhere? How about getting a lousy apartment with a bunch of friends (or a bunch of strangers who need another roommate) and supporting yourself with a part-time job? If nothing else, you’ll probably meet the kinds of people that you’d have never had a chance to otherwise. How about practicing your moral imagination by dreaming something up that no one else, including me, has thought of? If you’ve already gotten into school, what exactly do you have to lose?

Take time off during college.

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