I’ve heard this and probably said this myself many times: “Ang moh are okay with taking a gap year.” This practice is for a fact more widely accepted in the US and Europe, but I won’t dare to make more generalisations like that again. There is a whole community, orang putih or not, that encourages the option of a gap year, a perfectly viable and reasonable alternative to the rat race of structured education.
I am part of that community, and I’m Singaporean.
I will be honest with you: one does not simply conjure the decisiveness to postpone higher education. Mine came from somewhere in between the promise of a scholarship and the crushing defeat of a mountain of university rejection letters; a mix of confidence and desperation.
Not to mention that I wanted to study the environmental sciences without a background in science. Clearly, the situation was unorthodox from the start. Perhaps strangest of all was that while most found themselves with a place to go and no means to pay for it, I found myself with the finances but no place. It is certainly insufferable to possess a marked advantage yet still feel hopelessly lost. Somewhere in that mess I figured that I’d work hard, I’ll work for anybody, and then I’ll apply again.
And hopefully by the end of it all, I’ll still want to do environmental science.
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So here I am. I’m going to Duke in fall, just over 1.5 years out of school (one gap year is not always 365 days). Do I still want to do environmental science? Hell yes. Do I feel like I’ve lost out? No. No way. A dangerous thing about structure is the complacency it affords to those that pass through it, surviving but somehow not entirely conscious. My time off scraped away some of the idealism accumulated over years of schooling as plaque does on unchecked teeth.
Most of the time was spent working independently. I did some work for the organisation that offered me a scholarship, went to Malaysia as an amateur volunteer field biologist for an NGO there, explored a bit more of the region, and started to take photographs of wild things and write. In small ways I did something that I’d never done before: I regularly gave myself things to do. When I was a mopey teenager I was told many times that I should try to be more motivated. It was a terribly demoralising request, and my behaviour worsened in retaliation and maybe even resignation. What I’ve understood is that maturity is a state of mind which takes both time and circumstances to build; maturity of thought in one context does not guarantee it in another.
Similarly, to be motivated is purely internal. You’ve got to want to make new things even though no one’s watching and giving you gold stars - precisely because your worth will no longer be measured by gold stars. There is no formula to the sought-after spirits of maturity and motivation. You’ve got to take pride in making yourself better purely for the sake of it, all while bearing in mind that the more you know, the more you don’t. During the gap year many things will change, but no one will improve you but, well, you.
When you manage to do that in your own lovely way, you might experience the other sought-after spirit of creativity.
~
There is an unavoidable stickiness about education and the way which we put ourselves through it. It seems that being a full-time student all the way from preschool to a degree is the only way to go, while the expression of uncertainty and seek alternative routes insinuates weakness of character or worse. Level up and up, get a nice, professional degree and The Job (whatever that is). Then you’re supposed to, what, climb ladders forever, get married and a house, kids.
That is the coveted ideal…or is it? I think that there’s a difference between mainstream talk - the conventional path and how we’re told to structure our lives - and the ideal. There is no formula for the ideal, which is of course, happiness. Whoever you are – you may be barely 20, young and unsure about what degree you’re going to take, you may be already in university and are just reading this by chance, or you may be deciding to go back to school after 20 years out of it.
You may not know who you are, and you may not know what you want.
That’s cool. Just keep trying your hardest to find out.
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I wrote this thing about my year and then some out of school, for a friend's website. Since that year is ending soon and I'm going to university in August, I thought it would be nice to republish it here.
