Personal Reflection 4

The Benefits of Travel and Taking a Gap Year 

A gap year is constructive time out to travel in-between life stages. It usually means travelling, volunteering or working abroad. Often it means all three. A gap year is a 12 month break from study taken by some students before they start their degree, to help them gain work experience and valuable life skills.

Advantages of gap year:-

-Enjoy a once in a lifetime experience and a real personal adventure.

-Travel the world and discover exciting new countries and cultures.

-Step outside your comfort zone and get a new perspective and challenges.

-Meet new people and make friends for life.

-Take a break and return refreshed and re-focussed on what you want to do in life.

-Add unique experience to your CV helping you get into future jobs.

Disadvantages of gap year:-

- leaving your study for a year may have a great influence on your life in many different areas. For example you have to accept the changes in the education system and the foundation you built before.

- If a person didn’t plan for gap year carefully, gap year might be waste of both money and time.

- Traveling abroad give a person the feeling of loneliness.

In UAE I think not everyone know about gap year. And I think emaratis have wrong understanding of gap year. For most of youth in UAE after school means that either continue college degree immediately or find a job.The concept of gap year is not known a lot in the UAE.I think gap year is important if a person planned for it correctly. Volunteering or working abroad will be great experience for young emaratis as a gap year. The Gap Year concept I think it should be introduce to emaraties at the last year of secondary school to let them chose there next step in life.

For me I took a 2 Gap Years from secondary to college. I went to work as technician for Gas Company (Gasco) in the largest gas plant in the world. I kind both regret leaving studying and likening the experience of working. Although I didn’t used my two gap years to travel outside but its totally new experience for me here in my own country. It’s like traveling but from being teenager to a man. 

As a person those two gap years taught me to depend on myself. I learned that each stage of life won’t easy be like before where parents involved solving my problems. I learnt that each stage of life is a challenge which has advantages and disadvantages which I should live with wither I like it or not. I was very depressed about leaving education for 2 years for some compelling reason Compelling reason like I had bad teenage and I hadn’t have enough money. Because education it has a momentum. If u breaks this momentum u should go back to zero which is very hard to build again.