Gap Year Gold: Using Gap Year To Boost Admissions

Too often students are dissuaded from taking a gap year, thinking it will make a negative impression when they apply to universities. However, one of our Former Admissions Officers has a different perspective to share. Chris, who worked as an admissions officer at Princeton, explains why a gap year is often not only okay, but — with the right planning and approach — a great way to enjoy exceptional personal growth while actually improving your admissions chances.

A gap year can be an excellent use of time for prospective university students. The maturation that happens between age eighteen and nineteen is significant, and a year spent productively in the “real world” can endow students with a sense of purpose and direction, specifically about how they want to use their time at university, that is impossible to gain coming to university straight out of high school.

The unfortunate reality is that too often the very idea of a gap year is perceived as risky or unproductive. Other obstacles to launching a successful gap year, according to research, can be finding programs that are a good fit, or students' concerns over missing out on experiences similar to their peers.

But this is certainly not the case if you use the year for personal and academic growth, and plan for it with a clear focus and strategy in mind. In fact, I can say with confidence that in all my years as an admissions officer, I never once saw a situation in which a student taking a gap year was a bad decision.

Gap Years: Deferrals vs. Re-Applying for College

Most students will elect to take their gap year after being admitted to university, and they will defer enrollment while pursuing a year of enrichment.

Some students, however, may pursue a gap year after failing to obtain their desired admissions results in their first attempt, using the gap year to enhance their applications in their second attempt.

This second scenario involves a more difficult task, and thus this post is written primarily with these students in mind.

There is a common expression that repeating the same thing while expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. This also applies to college applications.

Planning Ahead...

Students who are denied by a university should not expect the outcome of a reapplication to the same university to be different if they reapply a year later with essentially the same application.

Therefore, it should be noted that the first ingredient of a successful gap year actually starts before the gap year even begins.

For students who applied to university before they finished high school, they must make sure that they finish high school on a strong note.

Their final grades must match the academic standard of their original application; if their final marks fall short of the standard on their original application, there’s nothing they can do during a gap year that will change the result of their first app.

Ideally, their final results will surpass the academic standard of their original app.

1. Enhancing Your Admissions Profile

With that prerequisite cleared, there are a couple of different paths a student can pursue to compose a meaningfully distinctive candidacy in their second application.

If the student was close to being admitted with their original application — i.e. if the student made it to the waiting list with their first application, or if she’s not part of an overrepresented cohort in an applicant pool — then the student can and should pursue opportunities during their gap year that enhance the profile of their original application, setting their eyes on activities that include:

• Capstone projects
• Pre-college or study abroad enrichment programs
• Research projects
• Internships
• Community service opportunities or initiatives
• Entrepreneurship
• Passion projects

For example, if a girl made it to the waiting list at Cornell after applying to study engineering, it would make sense for her to pursue a full-time engineering internship during her gap year, especially if she could supplement this with activities that use her STEM gifts to positively impact others, like tutoring middle schoolers in STEM on Saturday mornings, or, even better, asking some of the women in senior management positions at her company to host a “Women in Engineering” brunch on a Saturday morning for middle and high schoolers during her time there — or even a series of workshops during the summer.

Table: How Other Students Make the Most of Gap Years

Source: 2020 Gap Year Alumni Survey (Gap Year Association)

Remember, in order to register your enhancements when you reapply, your related activities would need to happen before the November 1 ED deadline or January RD deadline.

Students who make it to the waitlist generally don’t get there without being in serious consideration for admission first, so it would make sense that a student who was in serious consideration for admission one year and then added the initiative and accomplishment of a serious endeavor like the one above to her candidacy could feasibly get over the top to admission, especially if she applied ED.

2. Getting a Fresh Start and Renewed Focus

The other approach to a gap year — one that’s more suitable if you did not make the waitlist at any of the schools to which you’re reapplying, or one that’s suitable for students who are members of overrepresented cohorts of applicant pools — would be to, essentially, use the gap year to reinvent yourself.

This is a bit of a risk, and it should be pursued only when a student is also applying to a bunch of other schools for the first time, i.e. schools that they did not apply to the previous year.

In this scenario, the student would have discovered a new academic or extracurricular passion, or would find greater clarity of educational purpose and focus, after having submitted their first application to university. They would spend their gap year pursuing that passion.

For example, if a boy who was a strong but not superlative student originally applied to highly selective universities to study computer science but was shut out from all of them (and didn’t make the waitlist at any), it might not make sense for him to reapply to all of the same universities as a computer science student again.

However, if this same student also has strong marks in psychology, neuroscience related courses, geography related courses, or even English, he could feasibly present himself as a future linguistics student. After all, linguistics is related to how humans perceive, produce, and comprehend language (psychology); how the brain functions in relation to language (neuro); how language spreads across territories and landscapes (geography), and how language functions in literature and narrative structure (English).

If a student discovered a passion for linguistics during his final year of high school and spent his gap year engaging in some sort of substantial research project or other meaningful intellectual pursuit of linguistics, and if he were already a strong student, that could redefine his candidacy in a meaningful way.

Final Takeaways

We can say with certainty that for a gap year to be useful, something more than time has to have been added to the original application.

This could be an enhancement of the original application strengths and profile, while maintaining the same focus.

Or, it could be adopting a new focus — with a new or better defined major and more clarity of purpose, for example — essentially reinventing yourself or redefining your applicant profile.

A productive gap year will do one or the other, and whichever path you’re on, your gap year is likely to prove far more fruitful if you make a strong academic finish in your final year of high school and prepare for your gap year with effective planning and a clear and coherent admissions strategy.

Next Steps

Students with a truly unique set of circumstances or having trouble finding the right personal focus or best options for making the most of a gap year should seriously consider reaching out to their strategist for advice. If you’re not already part of the Crimson network, you can still get help. You can schedule a free feedback session, for example. You can also use the session to figure out if additional support from strategists and application mentors would be worth it.

Key Resources & Further Reading

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