

Ask YC: Gap year ideas? - deltapoint

I am graduating high school early and am looking for cool ways to spend my time before college. I am looking to do some combination work/intern, travel and educational programs. What activities do you think I can get the most out of during a gap year?
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sqs
After high school and before college, I spent half of a year in Beijing
learning Chinese and the other half in Palo Alto working at a Web startup. (It
sounds like a cliché now.) This was three years ago. I'm really glad I did
what I did, but there were many things I learned during and afterward that
would have helped me a lot. A lot of my friends who deferred college for a
year don't consider it a good choice, so it's not a given that you will enjoy
it.

My recommendations:

\- Leave home.

\- Spend only your own money. Don't ask or let your parents pay for a single
cent. If possible. (But stay on their health insurance.)

\- Make your own plans. If you're traveling, don't sign up for "packages"
offered by American (or whatever your home country is) tour companies. Get an
airline ticket on your own and correspond with local tour agencies, local
universities, etc., on your own.

\- If you have to spend your parents' money or get your plans approved by
them, then do your best to persuade them to give you as much freedom as
possible, and take as little money as you need.

\- Embrace your freedom. If you're traveling, don't overplan. Leave room to
take a trip to another city with people you meet or to abruptly decide you
want to go somewhere else or do something else.

\- If you're looking for a job, people will try to take advantage of you.
Don't underestimate the value you provide. Don't sell yourself short.

\- Asia is cheap, safe, and fun. South America, Africa, and the Middle East
aren't safe. Europe and Australia aren't cheap. And the US isn't quite as fun
(for people who grew up there like me). Those generalizations are what led me
to go to China, and I think they still hold (relatively) true.

I see from your post history that you don't program. If you're interested in
the tech (and tech business) world, which I think you are, then you will be
missing out on 99% of it unless you learn to program. I would recommend you
figure out what environment would be most conducive to you learning to
program, and then put yourself in that environment for the next 10 months.
It's that important. Then travel or something for the next two months.

My email is in my profile.

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pedalpete
You didn't mention where you are from, you might be able to mix a few of these
things together. If you're from the US, how about work/intern at a start-up
(assuming you're into that since you're on HN) in Europe or Asia?

There are 'working holiday visas' which will allow you to work while you are
traveling in certain countries.

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lionhearted
Start off by looking into where your future college will matriculate credit
from. If you're going to school, you absolutely don't want to waste any more
time/money than necessary in your general requirements. Most 100/200 level
classes in university don't offer you much intellectual bang for your buck. If
you could do one semester of community college and one summer term for $5,000
total and knock out 3-4 semesters of high priced boredom inducing garbage
general requirement classes, you've got to look into it.

Travel's good and builds the hell out of your wisdom and character. You'll get
lots of great business ideas from traveling too. There's two schools of
thought: Spend less time (4 days to a week) in a bunch of countries to see
which you like and see the major attractions, or spend more time in one or two
places going for immersion to really deeply learn about the place. I've done
both - I "quick travel" through parts of the world that I'm not sure if I'll
like (rapidly did most of Europe), and went for more immersion in China and
Spain. Japan I passed through on the way to China and fell in love with it,
and have been back a number of times.

If you travel, I'd say think about picking up some skills instead of just
doing tourist stuff. Tourist stuff gets boring. Learning another language, a
martial art, or some kind of craft that's big locally could be great times.

Working is good, and I know internships aren't such a popular idea on HN, but
I interned at my local statehouse for a while between semesters at university
and it was blast. Seeing how government really runs to some extent was pretty
eye-opening. (It's even more corrupt than you'd expect, but everyone's really
nice and friendly)

What I'd recommend against: Staying in your home area without a really filled
schedule. Because all of your free time is likely to be sunk into whatever you
currently do to waste time (so... maybe XBox and Hacker News? Just guessin').
No matter how much you tell yourself you'll read a ton of books, plant trees,
go jogging 10 miles a day - you probably won't if you stay on your home turf.
You're likely to read more books, jog more, and plant more trees in foreign
countries, at least in my experience. If you do decide to stick around
wherever you're at, I'd say almost overschedule yourself - some of the most
fun I ever had (in retrospect) was when I was running a company full time out
of Boston, building a startup in NYC, taking full time courses in project
management, and sometimes traveling for work on the weekends to other cities
in North America. Maybe 100 hours of my life were booked from the start of the
week, but I still had plenty of free time.

For whatever reason, being busy always seemed to mean I had more free time:
Anyone I wanted to see would always work hard to schedule me into the limited
time I had available because I was so scarce, I was never bored, and I
realized how precious my own time was so I did plenty of gym-going and reading
too. Great times.

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chris_l
WWOOFing

