welcome to the secrets of college planning on the host anthony and today we're going to get some insight into the gap here so my guest today is holly bowl she's the president of the center for entering programs and welcome to the show tha well as it turns out my father who started the company that i run now was a teacher and headmaster for years he'd gone to uva so we went down to visit but before i actually did that i had taken my own gap year so i had time to just explore some areas of interest to get a feel for what i want to pursue and then thought that would be a good match and i only applied to three colleges you know one go to the sixteen twenty and forty two sure people  now yeah so it was it was a fairly easy process for me so now so you graduate from university of virginia and how do you go from the university of virginia to president of the gap you're planning yeah well again for me it was something that was just kind of offered you know because my father was doing this work but actually oddly enough in my senior year i was an anthropology anthropology major and my one of my teachers said you probably should create a resume and cover letter you all  cause we didn't have a lot of career planning and so i just tossed off a letter to my father thinking you know use him as an example yeah dear mr ball you know i'm interested in a job with your company if you took me seriously oh my god that's my job so i you know i don't think i had a typical process getting into work however i took a gap year before college i took a gap year after my sophomore year ok and what my gap year actually help me do is figure out what i didn't want to do because and i think that's really helpful in terms of the gap year process right who are real pioneer in the field and over the years we were just worked with so many families and a lot of it is word of mouth we've spoken on you know on many of the television shows and at schools and i speak at a lot of the gap year fairs that now take place and and articles you know that come out so it's i wouldn't call it mainstream excuse me i would call mainstream in the u s now but the concept has really across the u s and abroad so what happens if a student posts here and says i'm a senior in high school i want to take a year off you know or younger you know or the parents want their child to consider it me to my mind it just should be part of what's offered to students so that they have a sense of choice i mean one thing that i think is a real missing with the whole you know k through twelve process is that you are in this track you know and then you're at the process is actually k through twelve right into college typically for a lot of people and that mindset and there's no sense of hey i choose you know i choose going to college they feel like they have to go to college and even if they want to there's not a lot of choosing in that whole process the gap year ideally i something that a student is offered and then chooses to do and then within that year they're picking and choosing things that they want to get at so they own the process in a completely different way and to my mind you know if you can learn at seventeen eighteen nineteen how to choose and create your life  and know what that feels like you're taking all that proactive energy into college and beyond that's personal power and that's going to stay with you no matter what and it's a lot of the success of gap year students in college so what does a student need to know when they go into the  they do they have to know i want to be a volunteer i want them to do they have to know anything no no they really don't and i've had some parents drag their children into my office sort of kicking and screaming and i always tell them look this only works if you want to do this so here's how this works here's what this is about once they realize what they can do and that it's really just about circling areas of interest and then seeing how those interest match with concrete options for a lot of them it's like wow i had no idea i could do this so if someone is here you were to come into my office you were seventeen eighteen finishing high school and said holly i'm really interested in sports i've been playing baseball maybe i like to coach or more play some more and then i'm also interested in business or and you know a variant of other interests and i start to just pepper you with ideas so i might say ok you can go to south africa and coach kids and sports there in the townships or you might go to australia and do some coaching or playing in these different areas of interest and then you might tie in a business internship you know for two or three months in new zealand or spain or ireland and that allows you to get like a half step into the working world you know eighteen nineteen yeah to get a feel for this is what it's like to work to cook for yeah i mean we work with all ages so typically it's the students between high school and college who can most easily take the times like a natural break so that's the first wave coming through then there's a smaller wave called the step away is that's what i call them so these are people who've gone to college for years or two years and they're saying you know what am i doing here i don't know what i want to major and or this is more of the same i'm just sitting in the classroom not very interesting or maybe they have to leave you know and so they're also taking some time to explore could be a small sister could be a full year it should be called gap time because it's not always it doesn't have to be a year yeah and i was you know i was just mentioning to you that we work with all ages so we have just a whole slew of people now from new york times article  who are older who want to take gap time really and so this could be anywhere from people from their forty's on up through somebody was seventy eight so these people that have gone to college and now want to go back are sort of these are people well a lot of these  could be people who are retired and want to take some gap time was like ok whatever i've not done in my life what i want to get at or i don't want to just stop working i want to get out something substantive and interesting how do i go about doing that so so the mind search for somebody should be what they're looking for in life because i think i think the starting point is my interested in and a lot of students don't get asked that question you know it's a lot of i have to i ought to i should these are the requirements yeah and instead of saying to them you know well back up here and start looking at what you're drawn to and in that process and it can lead you to really interesting things i mean years ago you were to the young woman who had lot of years of french and her father wanted to go do something with the french and carroll wanted to go to nepal and he was going crazy so what are you going to do with nepali nobody speaks in a politics at the nepal you know how this is practical she said i'm really drawn to asia now it's not that exotic life is a as a better life but her life is really interesting it all came through that draw to nepal she's fluent nepali she's fluent in tibet and she started cottage industry she's raised her children there she is married to a photographer they travel across mongolia i mean her her whole creation came out of this draw that hands on experience in the paul during her gap year and then where that took her from there and do you see a gap year in high school it's harder when the students are younger going it once you get below eighteen and then you can take up time seven hundred sixteen you have to find programs that will take you at that age thank you so it's going to be more structured group programs which brings me to programs so in terms of what's out there you know when i say gap year program it can mean a group program specifically set up for gap y students lots of structure and support could be three months to nine months cultural immersion service work adventure travel sightseeing all together you know with ten or twelve students it could be moving around europe studying art history and western civilization it could be t certification so these are short intensives where you're getting that training and sometimes are coming away with certifications and you pay for those are group program still but all different ages then you have these internships two to three months urban internships very specific kind of program that an eighteen year old can do in a number of locations that will give you that half step of the working world post college yeah and then you have volunteer all kinds of volunteer options that volunteer the cheapest you know they might give you housing and food in exchange for labor all the way up to group programs with fees and tuitions now one thing that i did during my gap year which was really key the first gap year i took was going off to hawaii for four months and helping with aquaculture research so i thought i wanted to be a marine biologist i didn't have a clue and you know took i don't know a month or so of just scrubbing out the shrimp tanks and chatting with the scientists before i thought of the patients for this kind of research this is not something i want to do in college or work  work in the world beyond and so for me it was taking things off rather than finding the aha you know you have majoring in anthropology which suits exactly what i'm doing now because i'm just interested in where humans are up to yeah and then providing these opportunities so now do you get any drawback from the high school carol service or anything like that or the i just want to hear lee now you know i think earlier on people were much more white knuckled about what is this is going to derail kids from wanting to go on to college which is not true and that's one of  the fears still if you take a gap you're not going to want to go on to college the reality is these students are far more fired up about their learning and they have a reality check of the world like ok here's where i might really appreciate having a college education yeah be near people maybe didn't have a chance to have one and you know and then just that clarity and there rested i mean i don't know what you see with students but i'm seeing fried eighteen year olds yeah just tired and and so i was just looking at this national institute of meth mental health that anxiety is the most common mental health disorder now it's like a third of adolescents and adults are saying they have this yeah and i think with the students it's so extreme they're just constantly stressed  and the summer isn't enough to fill back up before you go on to college i don't think so is the focus on trying to get these students to just think of life in general what they're looking for  because you can't be a student that just says well i want to gap year because i just don't want to do anything right right now we're pretty i mean the way that we've always run interim it's very practically focused what are your interests let's match the interests with these concrete learning experiences we're not travel agents right now we're not interested in that we're interested in dropping into communities year you're getting involved in something yeah i don't have an agenda as to what people should do you know if you came to my office and chatting with you i'm just saying hey here's what's out there for you to consider and then you're going to know which ones you're drawn to or not and so it is given packages of what is out i just described begin to describe things and in that process students really usually know what they want to do because they're doing this yeah well this sounds really interesting i like that one better than that even that process of engaging in choosing is really helpful because you don't really choose college and do you get students that sometimes they've applied at schools you know and they get instead of rejection letters they get well we want you in january following year right or or the following year some time right right so the you get those kids and then they say you know i'd rather just take a gap year and go to school in september when everything everybody starts instead of starting in january and it depends on the student i mean middlebury as you know has the fed minutes for years and actually what's interesting about those students well most when students are offered that some will take that semester and go do gap a gap semester and then start in january or some when they realize what they can do during gap time and all these interests they have stay for a whole year i mean looking at probably about eight to nine months of gap time well because typically it's summer you're doing your own thing fall you're on a program home for a break in between where you might reapply to colleges even at that point and then you have about five months january through may where you can weave together more combinations so you could do three four or five different programs during the year while in different areas of interest like a smorgasbord yeah yeah and a lot of it is just like lighting matches on things you're not tending fires you just checking things out in some you don't speak it very well so now you brought some slide so what are the slides of so what i actually was talking about middlebury college there and it got me thinking about the concerns of people have if you take a gap here what's it going to be like to step away from academics for a year how will i be as a student going into college and what they've started to do is track the g p s of gap year students so this is bob claggett at middle who is in harvard admissions for years and then he was dean of admissions at middlebury college for about seven years when and i've been on lots of gap year panels with bob for a knack at conferences and so forth when bob got to middlebury the first thing you notice is that the said myths of people who just had that summer and fall before college he said a disproportionate number of them were walking away with all the leadership awards so what's happening with that time and then he started to track the g p s of the gap year students and what he saw in this in this slide is that the dark blue for this is for middlebury the the blue or the g p s of the gap year students are higher than their peers pretty much across the board and he was accounting for their academic standing coming in so these are students who are out performing how they're expected to do based on their academic history and there are performing their peers and then the next slide is u n c chapel hill so he ran the numbers for us each apple hill same results even more dramatic the light blue are the or the g p s of the gap year students compared to the dark blue and these are students who are all different kinds of students these are these are high powered academics students these are students who are decent students just not sure what they want to get at you know to students who have learning differences it runs the gamut and yet pretty much across the board these students are performing their peers and they're often not doing anything academic for a whole year so that again what's happening there rested they're more focused they're excited about their learning for its own sake there's there they have a sense of i mean one of the big things that was missing for me in high school and i went to princeton high school my last two years how does math class history spanish this is fragmented curriculum how does it connect in within itself but how does it relate to the world around me yeah you know what am i doing this for just to get a grade and pass a test that's all very exciting but boy if you could connect the lines like wow modern greek i'm learning modern greek and i walk out the door and chatting with people in greek that's exciting now the when you were at college and you you met friends that were they just went from high school or college did did you see any i want to be told as a freshman you're not so age bound in college and you have such an advantage i mean i did not feel like i was run by the mob the way that i saw a lot of my peers seem to be so is there wanting to fit in yeah they didn't take advantage of a college had to offer as quickly as i did i mean i just joined clubs i moved on things and i wasn't what i saw as if they were sort of clumped together trying to fit in took about a semester almost a year before they really stepped into year students is that they're leaders on campus they don't have the behavioral issues and dramas that a lot of their peers have roommate issues that doesn't faze them you know they've actually finish college more quickly than their peers so they're more efficient students they're not changing majors changing schools trying to figure out where their passions are through more classes he also said this is interesting he said the gap year males outperformed on gap your female peers which is to to sickly really significant realises something's happening with these young men who take up  time that make them much better students just on a g p a level that they're looking at yeah yeah so the do when you go to school or you go to go to your classes you feel more mature and you're joining a lot more activities at the school as well i think i think people aren't intimidated because through the gap year itself they learned had initiate their lives and here's an example i worked with a young woman who took a gap year she went to college she was in her first year and a friend of hers and she were planning this spring break trip to south america and their friends were looking at them saying you can do this they didn't think anything of it because they'd already initiated a lot of their travels because both of them had taken gap time and so that's where the mindset was is yeah i can create this for myself i'm fine i can take on the world so you know a lot of something comes up where  students who take gap years is it is it harder for them to get into those cliques because there are years gone by they're usually colleges have those friends that they've all created that first year well there's all the other freshman so they're they're creating their own class so it's it's i don't think anything's established yet and i think they're there i mean i certainly i joined a crowded club i met people through different interests i had that i followed up on and that is naturally where  kindred spirits come from got you know an outdoor club or whatever yeah i you know if there's a bit of a destroyed for students it can be that yes they are they may look at some of their freshman peers and wonder what where their heads are here because people are really young now if you're a female landing as a freshman on campus to my mind you really want to not be run by the mob you really want to know where your boundaries are i'm seriously yeah my step daughter took a gap year no problems on her gap year independent placements in italy yoga program internship in dublin ireland never had any issues she goes to georgetown she goes to a rugby party in her freshman year in the fall of her freshman year and promptly gets roof eat nothing happened thank god but she was able to take care of self even though she was gone she told her friend who was with her she said get me out of here don't let any guy touch me don't let any guy near me and she got herself out of there she didn't remember any of that but there's and i don't mean to scare people off of college but there's a lot of crazy stuff going on sure in freshman year especially sure so the more formed you are the clear you are about boundaries a clear you are about what you want to get out or not the better so when when colleges give you the the spring breaks and things like that i guess that's that's just a break for the kids as well yeah right so you're still doing the same stuff that everybody else is that yeah you're pretty much i mean you're on a gap year you're following an academic calendar and you can orchestrate it so that you're home when your friends are home from college so you can compare notes and they'll be drooling over what you're doing you know once the glow of college wears off you know what you're up to make some pretty interesting so you know there are those parents that send their kids off to different parts of the world what happens with the kids that don't have the money to go to different parts of the world that you want to stay close that's a great question because a lot of times people are thinking the gap year has to cost a lot and it doesn't i mean you could stay in the states and do for example a program where you're working with middle school students in the outdoors like a mountain campus and that's this is a placement it will give you housing food in the stipend they'll train you like being a camp counselor but during the year yeah so you could do that in the fall and actually save some money as one of my students did and learn how  to work with children you've got like kids here and the outdoors and then you could look at something that might involve like working at an elephant sanctuary low cost or or a big cat sanctuary where they give you housing but not food to have cover your food know but you're not spending much you know if you can get yourself somewhere in there coming your housing and maybe your food that's a pretty low cost year and well what is some of the volunteer programs that are out there i just had a young man come back and he was actually a step away so he wasn't sure about taking this fall semester but he's so glad he did because it just got back from doing an internship or a volunteer placement in new orleans helping to rebuild the city so that was a volunteer group house they fed him they provided transportation out to the work site all  kinds of people from all over now he's about to go off and get his certification to teach snowboarding and then he'll head back to school hanna in the spring and the experience that he has as well right and he's grown up a lot and if you think about it you go from high school to college or college isn't that different from high school you're still going from class to class you're still with a bunch of your peers and you haven't done this right and the gap year does this great and then you bring all of that life experience you know into the classroom and beyond  can play some almost anywhere in the world if they want to go yeah yeah right there's there's so much out there people don't realize like the wealth of options that you can go and get at and that it doesn't have to cost a lot of money and you could do one thing that's a splurge as i did you know greece was an academic program my parents paid for that hawaii was volunteer and i helped pay for all the effort during my year so you can work in the summers are in between programs as well and you should to my mind like your year pay for your year financial responsibility is part of it  as well when we come to the end of our show and usually i ask my guess what advice you want to give to the parents out there that their sons and daughters want to do a gap year i mean i think the first thing is it's really wonderful to offer the option to a child whether they want to do it or not just that this is part of what you could look at in this process is part of your education that would be my ideal in terms of the actual concrete process there are gaps you ferris that they can go attend now these happen in january and february and there cross the us us a gap year fares work the american gap association is a nice contact i mean it's a resource as a website that trying to vet programs for american students and provide a lot of information gap year counselors are really useful where you know we do free brainstorming session for anyone who wants to come in and and i just lay out all this information how it works and then put up a scenario so that it can be helpful to work with a