As the year progresses, grade 12 students are faced with a lot of stressful decisions about their future. Students need to decide if they are going to go to post-secondary, and if so what school are they going to attend. On top of all of this, they have to focus on their grade 12 classes. Although making decisions about university or college can be stressful, it is beneficial to do all of this during your final year in high school with the plan to go to post-secondary after grade 12.
Students in high school are lucky enough to have a lot of resources and people to help them prepare for post-secondary. There are counselors, seminars about universities and much more. Your school counselors are a great resource if you need help with applications, or have any questions in general. If you took a year off after graduating high school, when you eventually apply to universities you will not have the resources and help that you have at your disposal in grade 12. In high school students are available to many scholarships opportunities and have your counsellor there to help you. If you take a gap year you won’t even know about all the scholarship opportunities that are out there.
Taking a year off after high school can really affect your momentum and could hurt your learning skills. Students have been in school for 13 straight years and have trained themselves how to study and find tricks to help them be successful. If you take a full year off before going to a university or college, you will be very rusty in the classroom. You will have to re-learn a lot of things about how to study and how to organize your time wisely. It will take a while to get used to the structure school system that you’ve been absent from for over a year.
In grade 12, students take courses that are designed to help you and prepare you for university. Whether it is the specific content of one class, or learning the structure of how a university class will be, if you take a year off it is more than likely that you will forget a lot of what you have learned in your grade 12 year, putting you at a disadvantage. If you forgot study habits and skills from high school you will have to re teach it to yourself while everyone else already knows how to do it.
Although the idea of traveling the world and not going to school for a long period of time is appealing, it is not the smart move in your education career.
