I’m a senior who recently committed to Hopkins.
Currently, I’m in the process of deciding the most ideal timing to take a two-year deferral (for religious reasons).
Would it be better for me to take one before going to Hopkins, or after studying for a year or two at the school?
I’m currently weighing the pros and cons of either choice, and was wondering if anyone could give their opinion.
Congratulations on choosing Hopkins!
If I were you, I’d take your gap years before going to college. IDK much about them. But the pros of doing it before, as far as I can see, would be 1. Getting a break from high school, 2. You wouldn’t be leaving the friends you made or the activities you invested yourself in, and then trying to pick up those things again, 3. It depends on how you’d be spacing out your classes, but some of the your courses, like the math or, if you’re doing CogSci, foreign language requirements, might build on each other.
On the other hand, I’ve heard that mid-college gap years are also a nice break from the college environment, and depending on how you find the Hopkins environment to be, it may be nice to leave the atmosphere for a while.
Thanks for replying! I recently received all the paperwork I will need to prepare for entering Hopkins in two years. I’m pretty anxious about how this deferral will affect me personally; there are certainly numerous benefits to going, including building interpersonal communications skills, becoming more self-reliant, living independently, and perhaps even learning a new language, but I feel as if I will have a gap in my knowledge of all that I learned in high school, and will maybe even forget how to study! I’ve heard so many things about Hopkins being such a difficult school to succeed in, and since I plan on doing either cog sci or neuroscience as a pre-med, I wonder if putting my life on hold and experiencing the world while being alone with myself will really be a good idea. Additionally, since I’ve decided to pursue an interest in brain science and medicine fairly recently, I didn’t take an AP science until senior year, when I took chemistry. I know that I can put in the work and somewhat understand what I’m in for, but in spite of that, I know that there will be an inevitable gap between the knowledge that my classmates have and the knowledge I have. And that gap scares me.
Do you happen to know about students who are like me, and in what ways do you think Hopkins is difficult?
I don’t directly know any students who’ve taken gap years. But let me tell you, coming from high school to Hopkins showed me that I never knew how to study in the first place, lol, because high school was so relatively easy. I think the first semester of covered grades is, thus, useful, and most students do use that semester to build good study habits. There are also resources like Study Consulting (which I utilized my first semester), where an upperclassman will meet up with you and give you tips/advice on studying, note-taking, organization, and time management.
Moreover, I don’t know how well you retain information from year to year, but I didn’t remember anything from high school, even going straight in. I did take Intro to Chemistry I and II my sophomore year, and some of the information I learned from my sophomore high school Honors Chem class did come easier to me, because I vaguely remembered it.
Finally, if you start off in intro classes, the majority of those classes will have other freshmen, so there shouldn’t be much of a gap between their knowledge and yours. IDK what the class of 2021 (?) is going to be like, but I think that maturity and a strong work ethic can take you much farther than intelligence at Hopkins.
I think that the most difficult things about Hopkins are:
- You do need that maturity and strong work ethic to have fruitful and stress-free (or less stress, at least) semesters. I'm going into my junior year, and it's *still* hard for me (and many of my friends) to break some bad habits like procrastination, putting off readings, skipping classes, not taking good notes out of laziness, staying up too late intentionally, etc. Nobody follows you around and tells you to do the right thing, but much of Hopkins learning is done independently, outside of class. Which is harder to do when you don't have good study habits.
- You really need to be able to adapt to different situations relatively quickly. Not all professors teach the same way, and not all of them are as clear or lenient as you'd want them to be. You have to figure out what works and what doesn't work (in terms of note-taking, studying, do you need to meet up with the professor out of class, or the teaching assistants, etc.), for each class, every semester.
- Some classes are just *hard*, man; things don't always click. And/or they may be very work-intensive. And/or boring. And when you get two of these classes in the same semester, or when you realize that you have three exams in the same week, things can get rough. This can't always be avoided. For these times, you just have to bite the bullet and keep giving your 100% towards getting through that week, or even that semester, and remember that all your hard work is going towards something.
Thanks you so much for that info!