Is A Gap Semester A Bad Decision?

Due to a death in the family, my focus in school hasn’t been the best. Neither has been my mental health. This caused me to decide that pursuing nursing just isn’t for me due to my experience in the hospital. I wanted to take a gap semester after this fall semester ends, to take a break from the stress school is causing me, and heal from the trauma properly by seeing a counselor or therapist and also take time to decide for once what major i want to pursue. Instead of taking out loans for no reason and regretting my major. Because it already feels as if i did that. A few family members support the choice. Others are making me even more confused by saying i shouldn’t take a semester off and should do online classes or choose right now which major i want and then figure out as time goes whether or not it’s for me. Some even expect me to intern in the summer as if it’s possible to do so if you’re not a junior or senior or have some type of experience with the subject. Im just bothered by how i don’t know what I’m doing with life and people expecting me to figure it out by January (end of Christmas break) , as if it’s really that simple. How do i deal with the pressure? How do i actually figure out what to major in without regretting it like i did Nursing? I’m a sophomore by the way.

First, check out the policies at your school. See if you can find out how long you can take off from school with no bad consequences.

Second, gap semesters and years in general are good things BUT you need to promise yourself that you will head back to school and finish. It doesn’t have to be in that major, but you need to finish and you need to do so in a fairly timely way. Do NOT get married or get pregnant or develop other life complications.

Third, check to see that you won’t have school loans that come due or start accruing interest because of the time off from school.

Fourth, online classes, to put it bluntly, s*ck and about 90% (no exaggeration) of people who take those classes drop out without finishing and/or fail the class. If you’re paying money for that, so much the worse.

Maybe try out medicine in a different context during your time off from school. Nursing is a wide-ranging profession. Not just patient care. You could try out data analysis, for example, and combine it with the health information you’ve already garnered, and you’d have a really solid resume to go into some sort of management and/or analysis. If your grades are high (3.7) and you study like crazy for the LSAT and score 170+ you could probably go into one of the top Law Schools. (Top law schools mean that you will be able to actually practice law rather than get a law degree and be unemployed. Aim for a top 10 law school.) Medical angles in law are profitable and hard to find.

Or just take jobs in something else while you’re out of school. Maybe stop by the Career Placement office and check out what they have to say about internships in other fields.

Here are some internship opportunities you may want to consider –

Student Conservation Association – https://www.thesca.org/
Hiking the Appelachian Trail – http://www.appalachiantrail.org/home/explore-the-trail/hiking-basics
Workaway.info https://www.workaway.info/
Coolworks – https://www.coolworks.com/
volunteer.govhttps://www.volunteer.gov/
Ready.govhttps://www.ready.gov/get-involved
https://www.peacecorps.gov/volunteer/is-peace-corps-right-for-me/

Or just volunteer at your local nursing home/ school/ Habitat for Humanity/ Library/ etc.

Or get a job anywhere – at a zoo, restaurant, ice cream shop

Whatever you do, you will learn a lot. Guaranteed. And those skills will be very useful later.

Best of luck.