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Tussenjaar ervaringen en tips van Calvin
My name is Calvin and I am 26 years old. I took a gap year at the end of 2013 when I was 20 until the summer of 2014. I study a bachelor business administration in entrepreneurship at Team Academy at Amsterdam and I just started writing my thesis.
I didn’t wanted to study immediately. I saw a lot of people around me who graduated at high school and went directly studying again, ending up quitting their studies because they made their choice of study way too quickly.
I believe gaining experience and discover some fields of interests will make your study choice much easier and often it is the right choice, because you simply thought of it better and you discovered probably what you liked and disliked. So for me it a combination or orientation and gaining experience in something that was fun and I had now the time for and something that would be useful later.
It was quite a coincidence that after my graduation at my high school I was asked by my hockey coach to hockey abroad in Birmingham. But only hockey for half a year was not very useful, so besides playing hockey at a high level I studied for my Cambridge Advance certificate, that I got in three months. After Christmas I went back to the Netherlands and I did an internship at my fathers office to help set up a new company and taking care of some sales and marketing.
Learning how to live independently
It was the very first time that I went abroad without my parents for that long, so a big like was learning how to live independently from your parents. You learn a lot in a foreign country when you are on your own; how to cook, how to manage yourself through the city and doing laundry for example, haha. A dislike was that sometimes I felt a bit lonely because I lived with a guest family, which consisted only about one old father of one of my team mates and the rest of my team mates were much older than I was.
Tips for those who are considering a gapyear: Think of what you really want to do. Do you want to do something fun and have an experience of a lifetime? Or you want to develop yourself and gain experience that will be useful on the long-term? You can have a combination of these two things as well. That is what I would recommend. Do like fifty/fifty, or find something that is and fun and useful. All in all I can highly recommend it. A gap year is often both fun and useful, because either way it makes you realise about things in life and it always develops you as a person in some way. And now you got the time for it, later maybe not anymore!