Name: Nicole Dhar
Hometown: Austin, Texas
College: University of Texas at Austin
When I was planning my gap year I researched constantly about what to do and how to plan my gap year. Should I just go with a program that plans it all for me for 9 months? Should I take a break and come home for Christmas? Where should I even go?
There were so many questions that I needed help answering and being from Texas, I didn’t know anyone who had taken a gap year so I had to figure it out for myself. And through all the research and then actually finishing my year I learned so much so I decided I’d share not only the story of my gap year, but stories of other gappers as well.
With that being said I’ll start with myself, my name is Nicole Dhar, 21 years old, born and raised in Austin Texas. I’ve known I’ve wanted to take a gap year since the beginning of high school which sounds weird to say but I really did. So I started working as soon as I could to start saving for my year of travel. (Side note: you don’t have to travel during your gap year, but it’s what I wanted to do the whole year.) After two years of working in the event industry, restaurants, and babysitting I managed to save $17,000 for my travels. Now this is a TON of money and by no means do you need this much to travel around for a year, but I knew that mine was going to be more on the expensive side. Why? Because I wanted to have a structured first semester with a formal gap year program. Those trips are completely planned for you and you’re with a group of people who also want the same thing, so it obviously costs more money than backpacking on your own. In my experience, since I’ve never really traveled abroad alone, the formal program was perfect for me. Three months, 12 people, 4 countries and everything is planned out for you. What’s better than that?
I spent so much time looking for the “perfect” program, but you honestly have so many choices and they all look amazing but the most important factors it came down to for me was how big the group was going to be, the places we would go, and the amount of time I’d be gone.
So that’s exactly what I did. I spent three months in Southeast Asia through ARCC Programs with a group of strangers from across the US and met people who I can now call some of my best friends. We did things like getting scuba certified together in Thailand, building water filters for a village in Cambodia, supporting local elephant
communities, and hiking the Great Wall of China. But what’s next? I had no idea. So I went back home for the holidays and worked for two more months to save up some more money. By this time I felt comfortable enough to travel alone so that’s exactly what I was going to do.
I traveled on my own to a small town called Saltpond in Ghana about three hours away from the capital, Accra. I was going to teach at a school for six weeks. Now although I traveled to Ghana alone I wasn’t alone. I was in a volunteer house with five other girls from various places across Europe. I was initially told there would only be one other person with me, so I was happy there were more volunteers but wasn’t expecting there to be a lot of people with me. I spent time with kids ages 2-13 and ended up building another classroom in the school. Looking back I would have loved to stay longer, but planning it back home six weeks sounded like a long time. But ultimately that’s how you learn what you like doing.
After my time there, I got the chance to actually meet back up with some girls from my Asia trip in London before solo traveling! It’s crazy that these strangers I met in September feel like a second family to me now and I couldn’t imagine my life without them. The connections you make and the amount of people I’ve gotten to meet and learn from that year is unreal to me. As someone with social anxiety my year off helped me branch out in so many ways and it hasn’t magically gone away, but I feel so much more comfortable being myself around people which is something I learned through solo travel. I continued to solo travel through the coast of Spain and Portugal after that for an entire month. I got to do things like see a Barcelona game in Spain, have family dinners in a hostel in Granada, and ride a motorcycle through Lagos, Portugal.
I then headed back to Asia to meet my mom in Bali for a quick week. At this point in time I still didn’t have a flight back home. I was traveling until money ran out or I got tired. The freedom of not knowing when you’re going to come home or know where you’re going next was so liberating. If I wanted to hop on a plane and go somewhere I would (if I could afford it). So that’s exactly what I did. I hopped on a plane to Australia before heading home. Stopped to see my friend who was studying at University there and then headed back home for the summer.
My gap year could have extended longer or been cut shorter depending on what I wanted. It is scary to think and plan out an entire year, especially by yourself. If I were to do it again I would have gotten an advisor to plan out things more concretely and helped me understand more of my resources on how to budget and plan accordingly to my goals.
Ultimately, my time abroad is what has led me to start this here, Filling the Gap. There is still so much that is unknown about gap years and I meet people all the time that have never heard of such a thing. I’m hoping to be able to reach a wide variety of people and show them other possibilities and experiences they can have before they head off to college or whatever journey is next for them.
I would like there to be room for pictures to be added throughout the blog post. (For that one you can use ones that I sent previously). Photos on the side of the blog post so you can see pictures as you read. But please make it as you like and we can revise it if necessary later. Please also create those other sample blogs I mentioned above with latin script below as a filler.
