Why I Decided to Take a Gap Year
My jumbled thoughts & rants consolidated into 5 reasons
Excerpt from my last newsletter:
My last night in Dubai, I was hanging out with the CEO of the largest space tech company behind SpaceX as well as some other really cracked people in a penthouse villa by the FIVE Palm Jumeirah. One of the guys was ex-military and what he said in response to me saying that I was “90% sure I was going to gap” really stuck:
They did a study on soldiers and found that their chance of survival directly correlated to the probability of survival they thought for themselves. And so when you give yourself a percentage probability, say 90%, you’re actually instilling 10% doubt.
From then on, I adopted what I call a “full-send mindset.” I no longer dilly-dallied over decisions and told myself to just commit. Even if I wasn’t actually so sure inside, I told myself I was anyways so I could embody the commitment as much as I could until I manifested it into reality.
Getting to the point where that decision manifested itself into a reality though was a process that took much longer than the decision I made in that singular moment, on practically all fronts: my own mental battles, parental battles, jumping through school loopholes, etc.
Every time someone asked why, it would always come out as a jumble of disorganized thoughts. But after mulling over it and telling the story enough times, the reasons started gradually getting more and more clear.
My 5 Reasons for Gapping
2 weeks before the start of the school year, I announced to the world that I would, indeed, be taking a gap year, along with a Tweet of my reasons drafted in my notes. These were mostly jot notes that mirrored my disorganized rant dumps to people, but to summarize and group everything together nicely, I gapped for 5 reasons:
Be more intentional about school
Much of my decision to gap was fueled by being exhausted from school and that I wasn’t really making the most of it or deriving any value from it. In order to make time for my side hustles and projects, I spent the minimum amount of effort possible on school to get the best possible grade. I leaned on the fact that I’ve always been good at cramming to “scrape by” in school for every assignment and exam. I thought:
“What’s the point of working so hard all my life to get into a prestigious Ivy League, only to be disliked by professors, never go to class, and do fine on the exam but retain little long-term, when I could come back actually knowing what it is I want to achieve with my degrees and how the content of my classes would help my reach my goals?”
Perhaps it is harder when the first 2 years are usually spent building up foundations with theoretical classes that are quite far and unrelated to the practical applications that draw me to the field itself, but as someone in my replies said: “You return more excited about your subject and ready to seize every opportunity.”
The other thing I realized was that it would be such a pity to try to rush to finish uni, only to derive 0 value from it. I would hate to end up in a situation where 4 years had passed, I got my degree, but I’m clueless as to what I’m doing - I’m working a job that I recruited for that I’m not exactly passionate about but I still have to support myself in some way, and now because I’m a full-time employee I have to spend most of my day dedicated towards it and so the opportunity to work on something I’m actually passionate about gets pushed back even more. Frankly, if I continued on with junior year normally, I would have had to spend most of the fall semester recruiting for my junior summer internship (which usually determines your full-time offer), and I actually have no clue what I would have even been recruiting for.
Make time to be inspired again
During school, my brain was in constant overdrive. It felt like I just kept going and going and I never had the time to even stop and think. Every waking moment was spent finishing up some task so I could hurry up and get to the next one, like I was stuck in an endless cycle of being a slave to my to-do list. I missed the feeling of being able to wake up feeling inspired and motivated to work on something I care about; the feeling of getting to work on something instead of having to work on something. My mind was always so clogged with things I had to do, every minute optimized to complete some task; I just wanted to make time and space for ideas to brew and just be inspired again.
Lack of builder / startup community at Penn
I never really found the right support or entrepreneurial community at Penn. There was a lot of talk about entrepreneurship, but rarely a culture of building, shipping, or launching. Many of the people in entrepreneurship club/fraternities were “entrepreneurship-adjacent,” a term I use to describe those interested in startups and innovation, but still end up in the most traditional paths of IB, consulting, or big tech.
They often hung small sums of money (<$10K) for pitch and innovation competitions, but those ideas rarely ever wound up becoming long-term projects. Startups that were launched were usually all software (I didn’t have a good example of a deeptech startup to look up to), and those that were working on startups often did so behind closed doors. Being around the right people is one of the most important things to crafting an environment that can nurture growth and success, but no matter how hard I tried, I never felt accepted and was never able to carve out that community for myself.
Desire to explore the world while I’m young
As the name “sidequest” goes, I’ve always loved mini-adventures and discovering little interesting bits of the world. Growing up in a Chinese ethnic enclave in Markham, ON (yes, despite Toronto being the most multicultural city in the world, the GTA is strikingly segregated), one of the biggest things I’m grateful for from Penn is how much it allowed me to experience more cultures around the world. With students from over 100 countries, Penn gave me the opportunity to make friends and try so many unique delicacies from all different countries.
Examples of food I'd never tried before up until Penn from Brazil, Israel, Central America, Malaysia, and Nepal! From a young age, I always wanted to “leave home,” but now, I wanted to see the world. Perhaps I get it from my dad, who was also a world traveler when he was young (he’s been to almost 100 countries!). I wanted to be able to experience life and other cultures and get to see the world while I was still young and had the energy to; while I could still deal with timezones, sidequest on layovers until 7 am, and carry a 14 kg backpack while lugging my entire life packed away in a 25 kg suitcase behind me. Besides, I also realized that the older I got, the more I’d be tied up by location and other responsibilities - I’d never be able to travel as freely as I can now (and without having to pay).
Work without student visa restrictions
I’d finally get the chance to work without F-1 visa restrictions, which were practically the bane of my existence. I used to spend so long going through the nitty-gritty details, trying to tear apart legislation and find a loophole through them. This included things like not being able to work over a certain number of hours during the school year, only being able to work jobs related to your major, having to get approval before every job from the school and USCIS, waiting months and paying thousands to get that approval, risking deportation if you worked too much, etc., all of which scared the crap out of me.
A snippet of me trying to hack the system (this goes on for 4 more pages). I felt so lied to and sad that I’d spent my entire life working so hard to get to America, only to realize I’d be legally blocked off from opportunities, and that I couldn’t just hustle harder or work on my own projects to achieve the life I wanted. Removing my student visa status would free me to work on other things that didn’t fall into my degree that I’d been wanting to explore and pursue, like content creation, freelancing, and modeling/acting. Overall, I could recraft my own brand beyond being just a student, and it felt so liberating being able to just chase after what I wanted (as they say, you can just do things, you know?).
A Final Note on Taking Risks
Adopting that full-send mindset was probably one of the best things I could have done for myself in 2024. It was the reason why I got signed by an agency in LA, why I got back into hackathons (and won 8 prizes!), and why I quit my original summer internship (and doubled my income instead).
An excerpt from a text message I sent to a friend around the time right before exams:
Recently the mindset has just been to lean into fear, like literally if it scares me now I have to do it. And I just wanna take risks now bc sure idk what exactly it is I’m doing but I think its scarier to not know what could have been.
In fact, I met my current boyfriend only because I told myself I couldn’t chicken out of learning a new coding language in a day because it was the only way I could get sponsored to go to Consensus (a conference I was fully planning on skipping due to my personal vendetta against the city of Austin and because it had been 2 years since my last hackathon and I was scared) but I ended up going and the rest is history (IYKYK: I even endured burn scars, cancelled flights both ways, and a falling out with my long-time bestie American Airlines, but it was worth it in the end). Highlights here.
At the time of my decision, I didn’t have much of a plan for my gap year either, beyond a rough sketch of what I wanted to do. But even if I wasn’t so sure of the path, I had the confidence that I’d figure it out and that I would find a way. A lot of things in my life are rather spontaneous, but perhaps I actually prefer it that way. Spontaneity breeds serendipity, and the best occurrences in my life have typically also been the most unexpected. As Steve Jobs said:
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
And at the time of writing this in January 2025, I’m so glad I was able to find the trust in myself to be able to now connect the dots in present day.
Sneak Peak: Gap Year Pt. 1
New week, new country
How 2 weeks solo-travelling in Cambodia changed my life
Winning 3 hackathons in 2 months
Find me on my socials:
Website: bit.ly/samantha-ouyang
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/samantha-ouyang
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@sam.sidequest
TikTok: tiktok.com/@sam.sidequest
LFG this was a great read. I feel the same doing my gap sem