English people: did you take a year off between high school & college?

Am I a better/stronger person for it? Maybe, in hindsight it was good to work for a while. And lifting heavy gas cylinders and bags of earth/compost must have had some effect on my muscles, though you'd be hard pressed to tell.

It was well worth while, not least because if I hadn't I would have not turned 18 until after I'd have started at university. Everyone I met was very suprised to meet an 18 year old travelling alone through south asia. It seemed perfectly natural to me. How it benefitted me was it made me come out of my shell. I had to engage with strangers in order not to go mad. It made going to university and meeting people a doddle. Boarding school had long prepared me for leaving home. Travelling gave me the social skills I desperately needed.

there's a lot to hate about the attitudes of the people who go on gap year travels. i possibly hate them extra hard because i am jealous that the only travelling i managed to do was from southampton to london. but that was, y'know, an adventure.

also the thing about EVERYONE having a year off would mean we could have a results-based application procedure for uni, rather than predicted which would surely save infinite heart-ache and fannying about...

I didn't have a year off, and I'm delighted I didn't. I couldn't wait to get to university, and also, as an Italian major, I knew I'd be getting a skivy year abroad in any case.

I still reckon I made the right decision. I had little desire to either work in a shitty job for months on end (plenty of time for that now), and while I like travelling, the concept of backpacking had little appeal even then. Pete B. is spot on with his comments above, too, but I guess intrinsically there's little to choose between shagging and drinking your way round freshers in a sweaty students union* and shagging and drinking your way around ex-pats in sweaty South Asian countries.

*I only did the drinking part, as I had a girlfriend at home who went for the year-off option. And do you know, I have no recollection whatsoever what she did during it? She dumped me as soon as she started uni the following year, mind. Hmph.

I recommend being sensible to anyone, i.e. not doing anything I did and having big ideas you can't realise.

I went to University at the age of seventeen, straight into a Maths course that all my tutors thought I was unprepared for and spent three months doing all the lessons, catch up classes and getting mighty drunk - all for a subject which I no longer had much interest in. However I was not the kind of person back then who could have afforded or wanted to take a year off, I was timid enough as it was. It is people like this who would probably benefit most from a well structured gap year (HOP PICKING!) and they are the people who generally don't have one.

I am very contemptuous of middle class kids bumming round SOuth East Asia as this is about 80% of the students I work with.

(Of course this is a massive over simplification and will prossibly lose me my job).

you'd think there'd be a bit more self-awareness on their part these days - i mean, have they not read 'the beach?' the dream turns sour! - but i only seem to meet more and more of this type.

anyway, i've heard that late-20s/30s travelling is becoming much more professionally acceptable as all of us who didn't do it first time round get jealous and decide to have quarter-life crises in Laos. can't wait.

"oh god yeah, India was marvellous, really, you know, spiritual."

I was the man with that quarter life crisis!

(Ha ha - I was about to say Cabbage to thread).

Elaborate, please.

The core issue with the charitably inclined is to what extent do external charities, aid and even mere policy making adversely affect the countries in which the aid has been given. To what extent to they import western ideals of economics, politics and heirachies on to existing systems to perpetuate some of the previous assumptions of the colonial forebears. At the heart of this can be the idea of the noble savage, or the exoticism of the wisdom of primitivism - which is usually an implicitly racist assumption.

haha my job wz to gather information for the auditing dept, on the salting and gritting of roads done during winter: my gathered info led to a massive cut-back in same...

two years later = worst winter of last 20 years

after that i worked in a sweet shop

*Note I am talking about my student years here where I didn't have to have a job. Now the little beggars are working 20 hours a week plus studying freedom is not such an apt term p'raps.