A Gap Year

I never intended to take a gap year in college, and it certainly feels bittersweet to leave Yale for an entire year, but I also think I really need this year to find some self-direction. Throughout high school, my ambition to enter a good college motivated me to persevere in both my academics and extracurriculars. I didn’t always love every class I took, but I knew to carry on. I also fortuitously ended up loving the extracurriculars I participated in.

College has been very different. In college, I’ve found my own niches of friends whom I have very special connections with, whether it’s singing along to Jay Chou or Big Bang songs together, speaking Chinglish or Konglish together, or sharing very intimate conversations with each other. I remember being inundated by the variety of extracurricular activities available at Yale, and while I’m not in any high-commitment clubs, I’ve managed to participate in clubs that I genuinely enjoy, whether it’s language exchange, ESL teaching, Chinese a-cappella, or Yale-China programs. For these things, I’m extremely thankful.

However, academically, I’ve struggled to strike the balance between learning practical and theoretical knowledge…and “intellectual curiosity”. I sometimes feel uncultured when I can’t inventively interpret what seems to be blue and yellow scribbles on a canvas or perceptively analyze political theories and literature pieces. Other times, I simply tell myself the futility of learning these knowledge best utilized for cocktail conversations.

I’ve lost the sense of direction I had in high school. Thus, I intend for this gap year to be a year of learning (everything–languages, history and politics of East Asia, practical skills through internships, the list goes on…), developing independence and the ability to think for myself (knowing my own priorities and who I am so that I am less easily influenced by others words and less prone to fretting about how others think of me), and a year for me to regain my sense of direction. I don’t expect to figure my entire life out all the way to retirement, but rather I want to use it as a compass to help me better navigate through the rest of my time at Yale.