Gap Year Goals and Plans
Looking to take a gap year after college? I’m doing it without a program.
My dad thinks I’m an idiot. People don’t understand why I’m not just getting a real job and then quitting it while waiting for graduate school opportunities. My mother says go for it. You might be thinking, Ashley what the hell are you exactly doing? And here is my answer: I don’t like concrete plans. They always go awry because the future is never set in stone. I do have some overarching goals and whatnot, which I’m going to outline here, but I’ve found that winging it is the best plan for me. I’m naturally a go-getter, so whatever I set my mind to I usually end up achieving.
I thought a gap year was the best decision for me because A) I’m applying straight into a PhD B) I’ve hustled way too hard in my life already and C) in a culture dominated by money, this may be my only chance to ever do such a thing again. I’m extremely lucky that I worked hard with the jobs I did have, because I earned enough money to almost completely pay off my $20,000 student loan, which, thankfully, was not a private loan with an insane interest rate. I’m very much a free woman!
Anyways, I also don’t believe in hustle culture. Why I myself am a hustler by nature, I don’t think this society I grew up in is really healthy for mental health and whatnot. I literally do not want my life to be work; my life, in general, I want to devote to my art and making the world a better place.
And so that’s what I’m going to do on this gap year. Here’s some rough plans I have going for me.
Take language classes and increase proficiency.
This really is a multi-step plan. First, since I’ll just have finished up the Critical Language Scholarship program in Bangla/Bengali, I want to be able to actually maintain my level of Bangla that I achieve and then get better at it. Currently, my game plan is that I’m signed up for fall basic Indonesian courses, and I will be taking the next level of Turkish over at the Yunus Emre Institute. Turkish has become very important to me and my research goals, as I want to focus on the former Soviet blocs, the Middle East (including Turkey), and the nomadic lifestyles of the Turkic people. I started studying Azerbaijani during the time of writing this, and that has been a strange but perfect mix of Farsi and Turkish.
Something else I’m really passionate about furthering is my capability and understanding of Korean language. Man, I miss learning Korean. I keep getting nostalgic for my NSLI-Y day and what could’ve been if I continued my Korean studies. Would I be going to Korea this summer on a Korean CLS? Who knows.
Plan a trip (a homecoming?) to Seoul!
It’s been three years since living in Seoul (or, well, technically Anyang) and my god I miss it. Seoul is my favorite city in the world, right before Washington D.C.—it would be such a dream to live in Seoul. Never before in my life, despite being such a foreigner and outsider to the country, have I felt so at ease and comfortable within a place. I’m currently planning a trip with my dear friend from NYC during her spring break, to hit up all the best sights in the city before we enter the real adult world (she’s still in college).
I also am pumped for the food. My god do I miss popping casually into a Korean McDonalds or one of the Parisian style bakeries. Paris Baguette had the best salad I bought, with a godly salad dressing.
Further my freelancing career and make an income off of writing.
I only realized recently that people actually want to read the work that I’m putting out. For someone who hasn’t really been paid for her writing, my god do I want to be paid because I know I put out quality work into the world. I suck at grammar and editing these blog posts, but I swear I’m competent in the real world! Upon writing this I also successfully pitched my first film criticism article, so I’m feeling quite good about myself and my possibilities as a writer.
This blog also made me really realize that I know my stuff. I’ve avoided marketing this on social media partially out of embarrassment, but you, dear readers, have been in an enormous number. I was in so much shock one day when a single post got 45 views just because of SEO. Now, you’re probably thinking that 45 isn’t a lot, but time for transparency! I started my website April of 2020, and over the course of that one year I only got about 450 hits total. This year, by the time I’m writing this in June, I have 600 hits already. Growth! It’s a real thing! That exists for me!
I’m a data nerd, if you can’t tell.
Develop and curate my knowledge about the humanities.
It took the pandemic for me to really sit down and think about what I liked as a living, breathing human being. And I decided I liked the humanities, but never really had the chance to delve into them outside of my literary and writing endeavors. In college I had the opportunity to take art history and fashion history courses, but I was extremely dumb and did not take any of them, except for the Costume and Fashion in Film course I took with the professor of my dreams (I literally want to be her). I focused more on film courses in college, as well as super niche politics courses like my Bollywood class (deceptive name. We watched Bollywood movies and then just talked politics.) and my Politics in the Middle East class. I was so sad that I missed the Caribbean cartography course and the Black in Paris course, which was literally added as soon as I graduated. Oh the woes of being me.
But during this time of my sitting around, I want to delve deeper into art, architectural, and fashion history. I want to become a more well-rounded educated human, and because I have the time to devote myself to knowledge, I’m going to freaking do it.
Read lots of books.
It’s June and I’ve already read 84 books. Think I can double that number? Let’s try and see.
But, seriously, I want to get more into novel writing, and so I need to be reading. a lot more novels lest I find myself falling behind massively.
Explore minimalism and Buddhist schools of thought.
Minimalism has always been on my mind, but recently my father broke our refrigerator due to his hoarding. We are a family of four and we had one fridge and three freezers. My father packed each one of them to the max, and then has his own personal fridge that he also packed with nuts and the hoard of extra diabetes medicine he has. It was insane what I had to grow up with; he literally has thrown thousands of dollars away on useless crap that he never uses. We don’t need four backup faucets.
Being the child of a hoarder, it gave me such anxiety to even go in the basement or even open up our fridge and see what we had. Along with his abusive nature, it was a perfect combination that drove me away from home. I chose to go to college away to escape from my father. Living in NYC and the relationships I made there, among many poor decisions in who to surround myself with, led to even more trauma.
I was watching an episode of Chef’s Table, the one featuring the Buddhist nun Jeong Kwan, and I was so envious of this woman. How she had her own garden and the monks ate everything from said garden, about how peaceful she was about the world and her general existence. I wanted to be her, even though I know my mental illnesses probably could never set me free in the way that Jeong Kwan has been set free. It got me really interested in Buddhism, so this is something I want to test out.
Hone in on what makes me creative.
I already know one thing about my creativity, which was dutifully informed to me by my therapist: I can no longer write or create anything when I’m experiencing my usual waves of anxiety. In the Spring of 2020, I stopped writing poems for four months. I was in a crappy relationship where I cried often and was constantly anxious about the state of it. And, so, my creativity suffered the deeper I lapsed into depression.
I want to experiment more as a writer and artist. I don’t want to limit myself to one genre, nor one medium. I think that my brain works in a strangely visual way and I often find myself stuck on the same concepts and images looping again and again like a film. I want the world to know how my brain works, because I want the truest, most authentic self to be reflected in my work. And my brain doesn’t work in a carefully curated and edited way. I’m a messy person. I don’t edit half of my work.
I’m also applying to graduate school in hopes of doing ethnography, which is essentially recording human history and culture as its happening. This is where my interest in the humanities comes in; I want to morph everything together in order to use material culture and literature to create something beautiful. To show the stories that we forget about, like the ordinary people.
And, above else, have fun.
I won’t get time like this again!
