Sketching over nights spent weeping into Milton or all over macroeconomics hand-outs, many will remember a period of relative ease, with its own, comforting certainties: I will hand in an essay (roughly to deadline), I will return next term, I will sit exams between these dates. Post-graduation, for those without a career-oriented trajectory, can be disorienting, and even rather depressing. For this group, whose rejections from employers only compound the post-partum depression, the gap year is an attractive way in which to reclaim one's future, and provide new, comforting certainties: I will work in this pub until this date; I will fly out on this date; I will visit these countries.
Is the post-university gap year merely delayed response to the more real problem of employment? Ultimately, yes; it merely defers problems for another year and realistically, come next July, you will find yourself in a new, swelled group that accommodates both those of your graduating class who are yet to find steady employment, and the new year of graduates.
On the other hand, travelling, opening your world, can never be described negatively. Better to go travelling - after half a year spent in a pub for the minimum wage - than to take the first job you can grasp. The latter will make you miserable, and you may well find yourself almost equally dissatisfied than when you were staring down another afternoon of Trisha before a shift at the pub. A lacklustre job search is less promising than the determined goal that you will, finally, travel to South America.
Furthermore, just like a pre-university gap year, graduates can apply to teach or intern, for example, while they are away. Since you have a degree, you might even be able to find a proper job abroad - it might not be a career, and you may still end up joining the swelled group of applicants next July, but say your BA was in Modern Languages, there is every possibility that you might be able to return to a placement from your year abroad. Budding writers and publishers can blog. There are, obviously, infinite travel blogs in the ether, and yours probably won't make The Guardian's best blogs line-up. But if you keep writing, new subject matter can sharpen and solidify your technique. Gap year is not necessarily synonymous with beach, booze and watersports.
While friends who have found careers and flats, and a new group, 'colleagues', taking a gap year might make you feel juvenile; the one who couldn't grow up, who couldn't quite relinquish student living quite yet. Suppress this feeling, and glaze over when they recourse to mild derision. There is too much pressure to leap into the world of student loan repayments and sales targets; if you want to resist, resist.
Phoebe, GRB Journalist
