What to take with me, and what to leave behind?

This is a question I’ve encountered many times in the past few weeks, as summer is ending and college rapidly approaching. Clothes, school supplies, and dorm necessities have all been piled into bags and boxes and set aside for the trip cross-country to Hanover, New Hampshire, where I’ll be spending the next few years of my life at Dartmouth College. But all of the lists titled ‘What to Bring to College!’ leave out perhaps the most necessary of tools that I’ll need to sift through before loading the car and leaving Chicago: the multitudes of lessons and experiences I’ve accumulated over the past year.

As many of you may know, following my high school graduation in June of 2018 I decided to take a year off from the typical academic progression to college, and spend some time exploring a few of my interests that expand beyond the world of the education system. This gap year began last August with a “cultural immersion” semester in Cuenca, Ecuador through AMIGOS de las Americas (a program I DO NOT recommend), followed by a Wilderness Medicine and Rescue Semester based in Lander, Wyoming through NOLS (a program I DO recommend). I’ve reflected on the different semesters more in-depth in previous blog posts, AMIGOS here and NOLS here. I spent the summer working behind the counter at Dinkel’s Bakery, just down the street from home.

These two separate semesters offered many different experiences, and plenty of (anticipated and unanticipated) quantifiable skills. Notably, from living in Ecuador I learned to speak Spanish nearly fluently, and from organizing a photo exhibit I improved my portraiture and interviewing skills. Studying medicine allowed me to come away with a much wider understanding of how to respond in an emergency, and my wilderness rescue skills will be very nice to have in my back pocket through all future adventuring I do. Working in a bakery meant I learned to write on cakes and taste the difference in many kinds of donuts — an undoubtedly useful skill to have, for sure. I also learned about many of the tactical things that come with having an entry-level job — how to count register drawers and what W-4 forms are, for starters.

More broadly, however, this gap year was a chance for me to develop a sense of the world unrestricted by academia — an opportunity for me to interact with people from different countries and different communities, an opportunity to develop an understanding of how I fit into the mesh. In addition to all of the hard skills I’ve practiced and learned, I’ve built up quite a number of soft skills that will hopefully be useful throughout college and beyond — how to design a project idea (like my photo exhibit) and see it through, or how to step into a leadership role (like an incident commander at a rescue scene) and make progress happen efficiently and effectively.

To answer the question of what to bring and what to leave, I know I’ll hold on to the less-quantifiable skills first — the lessons in self-confidence and collaboration and dealing with adversity. I hope that, armed with them, I’ll be able to step into the role of a freshman at college and be prepared to absorb and grow much more than I was at the start of my gap year.

I do not plan to continue updating this blog throughout my freshman year of college. That being said, I may pick it up again should another blog-worthy experience arise. In the meantime, please feel free to email me at gturner903@gmail.com — and if anyone’s considering taking a gap year and wants to chat with someone about it, please please please reach out to me! I highly recommend the experience and can give you plenty of tips!