is ok so that gap year it should really be called gap time because it's actually any period of time but typically it's between high school and college when two people take a break and they do a variety of things in different areas of interest or it can be a break once you get to college so i took a gap year myself before college and i took a gap year after my sophomore year in college but i also work with people who are in you know post college i have a woman right now who's sixty two taking gap time so it's really for all ages and can be any any period of time and one is the best age for a student to go i think there's a really natural break between high school and college so for you all when you when you finish up high school you might be a little bit tired of sitting in  classroom all these years so it's a really nice time for you to step back and say hey you know who am i what am i interested in let me go and check some of these things out that i've been studying in classes or things that i might want to pursue as a career down the line or something and i want to major in college and actually go and put your foot in the water of that field so i think you know seventeen eighteen nineteen or the great great age is to go so what did you all do not is this whole  yeah so i didn't actually start the company my father started the company and his name is cornelius ball and he was a teacher and headmaster for years and he always saw a need for something like this and actually it was in the sixty's he started collecting program ideas and just threw him into a shoe box for about twenty years and then he started interim here in princeton in one thousand nine hundred eighty when i was graduating from high school so i went to princeton high school for two years and took a gap year myself at that point so i was one of the first to go into this so he and he started it off at a time when nobody was talking gap year in the u s and now it's just not mainstream now but it's much more common and there are many more people taking time and i'm very biased because i took my own time so you do you travel anywhere special and yes i did i did well what i told my dad was i wanted to do something in rain biology and i wanted to go back to greece because i've been there when i was eleven and i liked it and that's all you ha hawaii to do aquaculture research because i thought if i'm going to be a marine biologist let me go and see what this field is like and after about i don't know a month or so i thought i don't know the patience for this this is not something i want to pursue so that was really helpful to know before majoring in that in college so those three months in hawaii hope for a break in between to actually apply to college is half way through my gap year and then i went to greece in the spring on an academic cultural study program so studying modern greek language history poetry literature you know with my peers so i was this two main things during the year so how did the different from a foreign exchange this is not usually academic i mean you can do something academic during a gap year but typically people are stepping away from the formal academics and so they're not usually taking the classes all that you can and it's also not one thing for the whole time usually you're doing a couple different things during the year but you can do foreign exchange i mean you can certainly go and live with a family doing an internship like what you all are doing and helping to run a you know a t v studio working in a studio right now you are getting a really good sense of what this field is like and it's great that you're doing it at the age you're doing it and you have way more experience than a lot of people who might be majoring in this in college so this is a really great example of something or you could be going off and working with animals somewhere or teaching or doing you know business internships and you just depends on what you want to do there's there's so much out there you can get at so what type of student like would you think would be good for gap year i always tell people anybody who's interested is a good student for a gap year and the type of student can really vary i mean you can have people who are really high powered students heading off to top schools you can have students who are you know decent students but just not that excited about learning or they're not sure what they want to focus on and you can have sense of learning differences who really need to take a break probably from just being defined by school you know send as many people so i think yeah yeah the places aren't quite as safe places that don't have as many program options so what we see is you know europe asia all different parts of asia people are going to she wants to do well i think i'll go to learn our language i really like spanish you know just like i do you got something to try and speak spanish right and that by the way is a great example of something that may not be that exciting sitting in the classroom here in the states yeah but if you actually go to costa rica for example and you're living with a family and you're teaching kids or you're working with animals you're hearing the spanish you're chatting with your family it's going to bring it alive you're going to be so excited about the language it's actually flowing out of your just for learning a language is that something that people do as well some people i mean it depends this is so much geared toward whatever somebodies interested in and you don't know have to know what you want to do but you can circle of locations in the that's how i work with people so you just circle locations in the world and all these different areas of interest and then i just start peppering you with ideas so if i see spanish i'm going to say here's where you go to spain to go to barcelona you could do an internship working for a company a business or could be actually and this was in ireland but we had somebody working for paddy wagon tours which was a tour company in ireland getting a feel for what it was like to do that kind of work any other interest you have when off what you want to do  yeah yeah i mean there's a great program do you have any mandarin already know now i never done and you don't need it i mean i have a young man he had no mandarin and he went for three months to beijing and studied mandarin and martial arts who's doing have been studying it for years here in the states so for you you know you could go off and do like a three month cultural study program with your peers in southern china where you're studying mandarin you're living with a family you're doing service projects something that's can be really important for students if they don't want to be disconnected from their peers or they feel like they might get behind their high school class and usually what you're going to find is there are so many gap year programs that are set up for your age when you're finishing high school so you're actually aboriginal ridgeley it's been pretty much me when my father started this work in one nine hundred eighty it was very new in the us nobody was talking gap here the term actually comes from the u k so in england people were taking up time it was pretty common at that point and that's really i think where it originated in israel and they have something called the o e the overseas experience which is like the gap year and the germans have the vendor yard and a lot of cultures that had this period of time where you step away from the typical track and you explore so and wait a minute you guys don't know this but as you get older it gets so much harder to do this or you take the time now as later you get really busy with work and you have two week vacation zx and you children and mortgages and you want to explore as much as you can in your teens and twenties and the older adult will tell you that i promise you ok to what you said so going back when this term was first introduced in the s was it ever not accepted or did they have a hard time being accepted or when did it really start taking off i think that's a great question because i think early on people thought that if you took at a time you were more going to go to college where there's something wrong with you and or you were going to forget how to learn you know you know if i step away from classes what what am i going to do when i had back to school and that was definitely earlier on even now i still get people saying you know this might not be a good thing and i'm not going to be able to head back to school what's interesting on this is actually a good transition into this data this is like a chip camera here and if you look and see it but this is bob clegg it's research so this is a man who is in harvard admissions for years and then he was a middlebury college as dean of admission and when he got to middlebury he decided to see what the gap year students g p s were like compared to their peers and what he saw was that the blue the gap year students g p s were higher pretty much across the board and then he ran the numbers for us he chapel hill different kind of university even more return matic results so this is these are the students who didn't take a gap year and the light blue are the students who did so with this means is that these are all students pretty much who didn't do anything at academic during their gap here so they stepped away and they came back to school and they were better students and then there's a fellow named bob mark hatch and he's an admissions at colorado college this is another university small yet that's private university and mark said the same thing he said the g p s are higher the gap year students are leaders on campus there are fewer emotional issues and dramas because freshman year people go through a lot their way from home for the first time and these students are much more mature and then there and also they're finishing college in short a period of time again what you may not know is a lot of people take five or six years to finish college because they're changing majors they're changing schools they're trying to figure out what they're interested in through more classes and then he said we'd like to see twenty percent of our incoming freshman class are taken a gap year i mean that's why this is huge you would not have seen this ten years ago with the colleges saying these are great students to have around when people take a gap year if they don't plan it well they can land in programs that are not terribly well run and that can be a bit of a horror story so if you're in central america somewhere thinking you're doing a medical internship and the doctors don't even know why you're there so you're just sitting in the seven to one of my students who actually this was in our placement but she found something on her own and she said you know nobody knew i was there was just sitting there twiddling my thumbs and it was really boring so that's a waste of time  can meet people get sick things happen when you're dealing with life you know suddenly you're away from home when you're handling things more on your own and you could look at it as a horror story some of these are you can be positive so here's an example my step daughter did a gap year this is a couple years now so she took a gap year and she landed in two hundred something independent so she landed in florence and for the first part of her gap here in the fall and she said you know what it was really hot i didn't know  just kind of up in the air exactly as she got lost when you travel around the city and she said it took me about a wee but she said that was one of the best experiences of my gap year because i had to deal with it and i did and i know i'm strong enough to handle those things you know a different situation she said i just pushed through it another girl landed in greece and she wanted to do sea turtle conservation where and the same thing with her she wanted something independent so she said here i am a grease t axi driver dropped her off evidently half a mile from where this sea turtle conservation centers and she said i'm in greece i don't speak the language it's you know it's i'm tired of all my bags and she said i just sat down by the side of the road and bawled for about half an hour and then she said well i should probably get up and people walking here and then there it was the center was right near by and she said there again she said that was the best experience of my gap here you can put me in any airport in the world and i'd be fine so i mean i don't know how much you all at this age go off and do things more independently but when you do you have the sense of you know what i find a way for my family i can handle myself you know more independently and i think in this culture we don't give you all no credit for what you can to take a year like this you need to do your due diligence you need to check out programs and make sure they're well run and you need to have enough going on during the year so that you're not sitting at home twiddling your thumbs when everyone else is going to college and you don't have enough to do  i can say and i always do this with the student i say look this only works if you want to do it you know for me as a counselor that's the key that you all are choosing to take this time no one's making you do it because that's more school you all expect to go to school and then have to college and it's a lot of i have to weigh out why should but gap time ideally should be i choose and so if a student comes and says you know what i don't want to do this i might say to them if you are willing to listen here's what it's what here's what it can be based on your interest here's what you can do if they still say at the end i really want to go to college i really don't want to do this then i'll tell the parents you shouldn't this he shouldn't or she shouldn't do it it makes no sense to push it on somebody but i  think often people don't know what the gap here is and what they can do with it you know if you all start to hear all these things you can go do doesn't sound more exciting to you and this is then it's very tailored to what your interests are we've had people in the in the old crow in the yukon which is way up north with the question indians and these are students who are training so dogs for the yukon quest so they were working with the local indians one of the girls who was up there she was really interesting she said it's very strange this culture because you have the modern and then the very old so you know she so you see people walking around in class calvin klein jeans and then eating  russia down in micronesia you know the islands of yap and polo which most people don't know about and you know doing you know fish fishing and teaching kids  sometimes people have to get up time before college and then they've taken another gap like i did after their sophomore year in college you know so i did my gap year who why greece and then two years of college and then i went to going to gap year went to india  and went back to greece or did service work in a and then even post college sometimes people take time i have a young man who took a gap year before college and then he came back to me when he was between jobs and he said i have ten days what have you got usually it's usually it's when you're a student you can take the time so you can do it after the first year of college you can yeah yeah and a number of students will do it you know once they're in college and someplace people need to get to college and demystify college if you will so they go and see what college is like or they didn't maybe didn't want to take a break before and then once they get there they realize ok you know here's college i'm still going from class to class i may not be sure what i want to study let me step away and take some time and explore has anyone ever gone for a gap year and extended it like you know i'm staying longer because i love it here and within the year you mean on a program in the state longer yeah yeah i mean i have a young man who went to japan in the fall and he had no idea they want to stay on in japan he actually spent the whole gap here in japan to study in but he's another fellow was actually having a hard time finishing college he was doing behind the scenes theatre work that was his focus and he said i'm just going out here i said why don't you go down to new zealand and go work behind the scenes you know in an internship in new zealand in wellington new zealand which he loved and they said this is great i want to stay here i'm going to go to school here and then he was i mean he's trying to get married to somebody there so he could stay longer but now he's back but but he definitely wanted to stay once he got to this place they loved it so he stayed on for a couple years there really year and then when you're in that area you can make have to go to school and so like soledad will do that yeah yeah actually samantha my stepdaughter when she was on her gap year she thought about actually attending  college in dublin because her gap year was italy in the fall a yoga teacher training course for a month in january and then three months in dublin ireland doing a business internship and she said this is great i love being in europe you know maybe i want to go to school here and the last minute she said you know what i can't take the weather it's just too great both you know i need more sun but the important thing is you know as you look at the gap here is as you move through it you're changing so you can tinker with your plans as you go because you're changing so you their group programs are for nine months you can be going off and doing service work somewhere in the world and that's all you're doing for that whole period of time it's rare i find it's rare when i'm working with students it's rare that they're doing that because i'm laying out all these things you know like this shortage of work so when i lay out all these options they want to do all these different things and so typically they're probably doing two three four different programs for experiences in different locations in love learning it in the culture like the spanish and that's what you're doing you're just striking the matches until you decide what here really likes me up what i want to continue it so safe only thing the host family do they come out of the experience with like a lifelong family like a second family sometimes a really strong badia i just actually met a fellow is probably in his late thirty's and he came over as an exchange student to texas and he was staying with his family and you know even after all those years from europe they became over europe so a lot of people have second homes in a sense you know if they're staying with a family for three months they become like a second like a set of parents so why don't we talk about host family ok so what kind of people are typically host families like so it's a whole host family thing where they're like oh my house and so being free to exchange students or have to work usually host families are part of a program so that if you're if you're going for say three months to in central or south america and you want to do service projects and adventure travel and you know work with local government non government organizations you're often staying with local families so the program is setting here up with homestay families and often you are you've got brothers and sisters so that's where you're actually speaking the language that you want to study so if you're going to spanish you c do that you go live with the family use your spanish every day or try to and often little kids there so it's easier to speak with them and they're going to take care of you in their teaching you about their culture here's what we eat you know this is how we are and it gives you a much deeper immersion even if it's not that long a home stay so it's there are programs for you just going to a homestead so much usually it's tied in with like language classes or some activity or service work that you're doing so space that's probably really excited about it he talks about it he's probably really animated yeah it's a face like that we're right and that's what you get from this because it's so absorbing you know when you land in another culture like that it's completely absorbing possibility rather than it's just a high school to college is the only thing our high school to work ok that's that's a really nice ending you know ok one last question where we go ok how can people contact or your company ok so i'm i'm right here in princeton and then we have an office in northampton massachusetts the website's the best thing to go to so it's interim programs dot com or for interim programs or look up intern programs dot com