Teen Spirit is in that summer-after-high-school time of life, an interesting limbo between the end of one experience and the beginning of another. And it is fraught with excitement, expectation and, this being Smartmom talking here, anxiety.
The anxiety comes because Teen Spirit is taking what is now called a “gap year” (which was called “taking a year off” when Smartmom was in college, but now it has an official name and almost no stigma at all).
At first, Smartmom wondered if it would be awkward when people asked what her son is doing in the fall. Now she just says, “He’s going to ‘Gap Year University,’” and that usually shuts them up.
More often than not, people seem to love the idea. Quite a few have said some version of, “I wish I’d done that rather than flounder my way through my first year at college.”
Back in her day, Smartmom knew a few kids who did interesting things on their year off before college. One friend lived on a kibbutz, another went sailing around the world. Still another was an intern at a documentary film company.
It seemed very brave to Smartmom at the time and it wasn’t something she ever considered for herself. She wasn’t really the independent, design-your-own-major type of person back then. She did what she was supposed to do and left it at that.
Smartmom remembers her summer between high school and college. She worked at an insurance company where she filed, typed and answered phones. The boredom was excruciating, but Smartmom enjoyed her lunch hours at the Great American Health Bar on West 57th Street and the paychecks on Fridays.
She especially loved quitting time, when she could go home and be with her high school friends, especially her boyfriend. They’d already decided that they were “breaking up” for college. Still, they savored the last months of their relationship and went to concerts in Central Park, movies at the Elgin and bars on Columbus Avenue.
At the end of August, she was thrilled to say good-bye to the tedium of an office job. She packed a big trunk, bid farewell to her boyfriend and her beloved high school friends and journeyed to SUNY-Binghamton on the southern tier.
Orientation was really scary and she figured she’d probably made a huge mistake by going to a huge state school in a strange upstate city. But within a few days, she had a new best friend and a whole gaggle of interesting people she was becoming attached to.
In other words, Smartmom survived the transition and successfully reinvented herself as a college freshman.
Smartmom wonders how Teen Spirit feels watching his friends go off to college. Last week one friend left for the Art Institute of Chicago while others are off to Brown University, Reed, Lewis and Clark, and Grinnell.
Luckily, one of Teen Spirit’s best friends is also attending “Gap Year University” and that is a real source of comfort for Smartmom. They tend to be very creative and constructive together and Smartmom has a hunch that they’ll be an inseparable duo in the year to come.
Teen Spirit has two friends who took a gap year last year. One of them got his own apartment and worked at an office job at a small firm in Manhattan. The other boy taught English in South America. After a year of working and traveling, they both feel ready and very motivated to go to college.
That’s the Gap Year University success story. Smartmom’s big fear is that Teen Spirit won’t ever want to go to college after his stint at GYU — and that’s why a lot of parents don’t like the gap year idea in the first place.
But Smartmom believes that it really is, probably, the best thing for the iconoclastic Teen Spirit. It will give him a chance to work, to travel and to play music, which is something he’s really passionate about.
It will also be an opportunity for him to do something other than school, which he’s done for most of his life. He seems eager to exist outside of that structure for a while, and Smartmom has a hunch that this will be a liberating way for him to reinvent himself a little bit and find out what makes him tick.
Trouble is, it’s hard to tell when the program at Gap Year University actually begins. There are no schedules, no course catalogs and no freshman advisers. It’s all a little free form and very open ended. But that, Smartmom tries to remind herself, is the whole point.
She just hopes his grades are good.
