This is officially our article of our short High
School series for those students that are aiming for an
undergraduate degree in the US now, until this point we've covered all the
grades all the way from class 9 until Class 12. But I know that some of you
are out there that are taking a gap year either you didn't get into a good
University you didn't know about the deadlines or just had a whole different
personal reason altogether. Whatever it is important that you take some
strategic steps within your Gap year to make sure you can stand out uniquely
and have a strong profile when you're applying to colleges in the US.
Questioning
about Gap Years
I'm going to be very honest here Gap year students are
definitely scrutinized by admission officers which means that they will put you
under a microscope and ask more questions in terms of more personal essays that
you'll have to write to explain. Why you took a gap year and just saying that
it was a personal reason is not good enough, you need to show that you had a
reason and you also did something productive in that Gap year because College
admission officers know that you've completed High School you're not going to
school for you know majority of the day so what exactly are you doing. If
you've just taken a gap year to apply to colleges they kind of see it as a
waste of time now.
Apply as a
Transfer Student
The other thing I want to point out here is many
students end up starting the first year of college in India and then think that
they can just apply as a gap year student that is not allowed. If you start
your degree in another country you are no longer considered a first year
undergraduate applicant you can only apply as a transfer student and you cannot
hide that you just didn't go to university that is also unethical and you can
get you can definitely get into a lot of trouble for doing that.
Make your
Year Productive as a Gap Year Student
So we're going to talk about some things that you can
do to make your year productive as a gap year student remember since you're no
longer in high school a lot of the things are not going to be handed over to
you. So you will need to take an additional amount of effort to figure out and
make a plan sort of like a timetable for yourself to be productive securing a
full-time opportunity is number one on your list now.
Volunteering
Based Activity
You need to make sure that you have some place that
you can spend most of the time in the day now this can be in different forms. The
first preference that I personally have is a volunteering based activity. So
let's say you find a local school or a community near your house where you can
go spend your entire day, where you're helping out either teaching students or
helping out in some other way, it can even be like a church or a temple where
you're trying to you know help make meals for homeless people or
underprivileged people anything but you're spending majority of the day and you
do that for maybe four or 6 months that is a good use of time.
Unpaid or
Paid Internship
The second thing can be an unpaid or paid internship
most likely it's going to be unpaid because you are just a high school student
especially in countries like India and that's perfectly. The internship can be
something related to your field that you potentially want to study let's say
you want to do computer science engineering. You can maybe get a very basic
internship at a company through like family and friends where you're just
learning some basic stuff. Maybe you're just doing very basic amount of code
work for a particular team looks great on your resume as a gap year student.
Science-based
Degree
The next thing is let's say if you're trying to go
into a science-based degree like biology or Premed you can Shadow a doctor you
can do this for 40 hours or 60 hours which is typically considered standard in
different departments to show that you were trying to explore which career
interest would be the best fit for you.
Online
course
Online courses are another place to effectively
utilize your time which are typically known as muks massive open online courses
websites like corsera edx have courses from well-reputed universities where you
can actually learn specific fundamentals and even get certificates to prove that
you did this particular course since you are a gap student and you have plenty
of time in your hands it's not enough just to do the course and get the
certificate after doing that maybe try to work on a self-started independent
project. This project can be like your own personal passion. SL research
project and you're building a prototype it can be a software prototype a
hardware prototype.
Why you took
a gap year in the First Place?
A lot of stuff is available on like YouTube tutorials
that you can figure out to do something productive the next thing is addressing
why you took a gap year in the first place now you will explicitly be asked to
answer this question and this should typically be a mixture of two parts. The
First Response should be your genuine reason of why you decided to take a gap
year this can be maybe a personal reason finances weren't good for the family whatever
the actual reason. The second part of this response should be what you actually
did productively in your Gap year now I know that the space that they provide
may not be enough to write all of these details so maybe the second part of
this answer as to what you did productively in your Gap year can be added to the
additional information section where they give you like 700 Words which is more
than one page to write about anything else that may have been missed in your
application. So that's all that I had for like the strategies while applying as
a gap year student.
I want to leave you guys with is that do not apply for
the spring intake I know that many consultancies and even just dates in general
seem very convenient that you've missed deadlines. You can just apply for the
spring intake but you get in a lot of trouble there are no very few
scholarships available not a lot of colleges actually offer the spring intake.
In fact none of the eight IV leagues offer spring intake top 20 colleges even
do not and lastly you may face issues with your Visa if you are going for a
spring intake so it's better to wait until next fall to make sure you're doing
the whole process right and your max maximizing your chances of getting into a
good University good scholarship and taking the right path now.
