It’s the most wonderful time of the year – application season. For many in their final year of their undergraduate degree, this is a time for intense research, creating relationships with potential supervisors, beefing up résumés, and improving grades to meet academic requirements. It’s no wonder then that many students consider taking a break.
A gap year means something different to each person. It can mean a year off school to travel or to work and earn money or even to go back to school and take some classes out of interest that your degree may not have allowed time for.
For the majority of us students who did not take a gap year between finishing high school and entering university, we’ve been schooling non-stop since we were potty-trained. This amount of intense work and often prolonged stress is bound to take a toll on our mental health. Gap years may very well help students avoid academic burnout.
Beyond providing a well-deserved break, gap years host a myriad of positive benefits. They allow students to gain experiences that are beyond what the confines of the campus can offer. These experiences can then be used to supplement what was taught in the classroom to make student applicants stand out from the crowd.
Why the hesitation then to take a gap year? I have been told by friends that they fear the gap year because they fear they will enjoy it too much and as a consequence, lose any motivation to continue in academia. Graduate school is hard work. The same can be said for professional school and entering the workforce.
I argue that if you are truly secure in your goals, then you’ll see them through despite the promise of the gruelling work they require. If a year off school is enough to lose motivation in attaining a goal, that goal is likely not a reflection of your true desires.
Ultimately, that is what a gap year is meant for. It’s the optimal time for self-reflection and to discover what you truly want from life – and that may not include the graduate program that you’re planning on enrolling in.
The fear that taking a year off school may be frowned upon by application and hiring boards is a valid fear but ultimately unfounded. Many schools recognize the value of time spent away from school. The University of British Columbia has the option to defer graduate studies for up to one year. Even Harvard University encourages students to defer their acceptance to the university and take the time to mature as a person. Taking a break after working to achieve an undergraduate degree no longer carries the stigma of weakness or laziness
Where I’ll be a year from now remains a mystery. I may be happily enrolled in graduate school or on route to some far-away destination. I’m planning for both, and others should too.
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I don’t know what I’m doing for Halloween. I don’t know what the weekend will consist of, what life after my next midterm will be like or what’s for breakfast tomorrow morning.
“I’m keeping my options open,” was usually my response whenever someone asked about my plans for life after McMaster. While this is true enough, it was a cop-out answer that really meant short-term goals, school or work related, were taking priority over the intimidating reality of how I want to define myself after university. It’s difficult to think about a year or more in advance when your day-to-day challenges are current and more obvious.
It’s too easy to get caught up in the present. If it weren’t for the pestering of nearly everyone I knew and a coincidental Avenue notification in one of my classes detailing an upcoming grad school information session, it is very unlikely that the idea of preparing for post-McMaster would have occurred to me.
While McMaster has a substantial amount of resources related to preparing students for the inevitable, the worry is simply that the university doesn’t do a good enough job promoting these.
On Oct. 18, 19 and 20, there is a “Continuing Education Fair” in the MUSC Marketplace. Between Oct. 11 and Oct. 17, a total of eight posts were made between the Facebook and Twitter accounts of the McMaster Student Success Centre about the event. It doesn’t show up on any of the main McMaster University social media accounts, and it doesn’t show up on any of the events calendars on the McMaster Daily News, the McMaster Alumni website or the McMaster site.
The chances of you finding out about the event were about the likelihood you happened to follow one specific subset of McMaster related content and were coincidentally one of the impressions. Why should you care about the event when McMaster barely seems to?
With over 70 post-graduate representatives showing up, you would think there would be more of an effort to ensure current students know what’s happening. While the MUSC Marketplace has heavy traffic, it does not account for students who may not have classes close by enough to stumble on the event. It certainly doesn’t help that workshops at the fair require registration on OSCARplus too, so a student finding out about it last minute may not be able to participate.
Maybe there’s an overreliance on hoping the initial “apply for graduation” option on Mosaic suddenly sparking motivation. The logic that post-university is inevitable and thus should be considered is fine on paper, but often fails when life right now is so prominent. I’m simply not sure if the university assumes students will find out about events through their own means and drive, or if they don’t actually care about pushing the community towards becoming productive alumni.
It is disheartening to see constant news about McMaster alumni and their successes, but so little about how to actually achieve similar success. The most tragic part is I have absolutely no idea what other events or resources I have missed as a graduating student because I wasn’t in the know, didn’t follow the right niche on social media or didn’t see a poster in a hallway I’ve never gone down.
While the university has prepared me for the future education-wise, I feel like the university has let me down when considering the lack of importance placed on how to actually use this education. All it would take are a couple more reminders about what McMaster is already providing to its students.
McMaster will be forced to relocate its Centre for Continuing Education from its 50 Main St. E. outpost after being told by the city that it must vacate the building by 2015.
The space is known for formerly housing the Wentworth County municipal courthouse and will be reclaimed by the City, which will cough up $32-million to renovate a building they had planned to sell for $5.6 million.
The expensive revamp and changing of the guard is necessary because of overcrowding in John Sopinka Courthouse, just down the street.
Lack of space in the courthouse has forced the City to find a new home for provincial offences offices and courtrooms by August 2017 when they have been asked by the province to pack their bags and leave.
After much debate, it was decided that the City would be best off reclaiming the building which McMaster has been leasing for approximately $180,000 per annum since 2000.
“We can stomp our feet about it all we like, but ultimately what I’m hearing is this is the cheapest option,” said Councillor Chad Collins (Ward 5) at a general issues committee meeting Wed. Jan. 22.
Such a move poses an “aggressive timeline” and will affect the 200 staff members and 4000 students who make use of CCE each year, said Gord Arbeau, Director of Public & Community Relations at McMaster.
“Relocating all those components to a new location is a complex move. What we’re trying to do right now is work with the city to gain an understanding as to their timelines and try to put together a process where we can move as quickly as possible,” he said.
Arbeau was quick to point out that university services will not be disrupted as McMaster is close to announcing a new location, pending final negotiations with the city. He could not specify the nature of the building, but was hopeful that the deal could be finalized in a timely fashion.
“As we finalize plans on this new downtown location, we are certain that the University and the city can make arrangements to ensure that the move is handled in an effective and efficient way,” he said.
With neither of the moves being particularly appealing to either party at this moment, Arbeau says that the university is disappointed they didn’t purchase the building when they had the chance.
“Thinking about the future of the building, our preference had been to purchase it. But that offer expired several months ago,” he said.
McMaster is also building an $84-million downtown health campus, which will play host to the City’s Public Health Services as well as the university’s departments of family medicine, and continuing health sciences education.
