Gianna Schmidt, a high school senior in St. Paul, Minnesota, teetered between two different plans last spring: She could either enroll for her first year at the University of Minnesota with many of her friends and classmates, or she could take some time to try something new.
Only hours before the deadline, she made her decision, influenced in part by something her dad said.
“He encouraged me,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘Yeah, I was always too scared to take this leap of faith and to do a gap year or any sort of mission year, and it’s one of my biggest regrets.'”
Schmidt has no regrets about the gap year she recently finished with Source of All Hope, a missionary community dedicated to bringing Christ to Baltimore. It was a time of intense prayer, formation and friendship with people living in poverty on the city’s streets. Schmidt sums up her experience in three words: “crazy, challenging and beautiful.”
Taking a “gap year” between levels of schooling, first popularized in Great Britain in the late 1970s, has recently gained traction in the U.S., with social scientists studying their psychological benefits and Harvard academics touting them in the Harvard Business Review.
‘A type of pilgrimage’
But if the expression is relatively new, the idea is ancient, says David Douglas, executive director of the St. Therese Institute of Faith and Mission in Saskatchewan, Canada.
“A gap year is not some modern concept,” he explained. “It’s a type of pilgrimage.” Like a pilgrim, someone taking a gap year — even if he or she doesn’t literally travel — steps outside of normal life for a time and, hopefully, “comes back … with renewed vision and renewed sense of self and of purpose in the world.”
The St. Therese Institute offers a “Catholic Gap Year,” a nine-month faith and formation experience designed to help young people discern the purpose of their lives.
“This is the most important project of your life: to know yourself in Christ,” Douglas said. “And then through that knowledge, to go into the work of your life and discover what it is that you’re here to do. And many of us forget to actually reflect on that and figure out, OK, what does that mean for me?”
Blending service and formation
Catholic high school and college graduates who want to take a gap year have plenty of options. Some focus on missionary work, some on service, some on formation or preparation for the future; many incorporate all these elements. In addition to Source of All Hope and the St. Therese Institute, here are just a few:
1. The Pines Catholic Camp: Spend a year working with children and teens at a long-running Catholic camp in East Texas. Participants do everything from managing a zipline to leading small group discussions, while also having time for prayer and formation.
2. Con-solatio: Go out to the peripheries, bringing the presence of Christ to some of the world’s most deprived areas. This is an international experience for 18- to 30-year-olds with a missionary heart.
3. Harmel Academy of the Trades: Learn the basics of carpentry, plumbing and other skilled trades through the Foundations of Skilled Stewardship Program — either as a standalone experience or a prelude to continued training at this Catholic trade school in Michigan.
4. The Culture Project: Spread the good news of the Church’s teachings on human dignity and sexual integrity to young people navigating a broken culture. In addition to spiritual formation, participants receive training in public speaking and other professional skills.
5. Verto Education: See new parts of the world while earning credit that can count as your freshman year in college. While not a Catholic organization itself, Verto partners with several Catholic colleges, including Providence College and The Catholic University of America.
6. The Catholic Volunteer Network: A go-to source for service-oriented gap-year opportunities, gathering hundreds of opportunities at organizations large and small.
Stepping outside the status quo
For Gianna Schmidt, the past year in Baltimore at Source of All Hope has been the hardest thing she’s ever done but the most formative. She returned to Minnesota with a clearer understanding of herself and new plans to study nursing instead of business.
Pushing against the steady current that moves young adults from high school to college to career in order to take a gap year gave God time to work on her. “And I needed to be worked on,” Schmidt said. “I needed to be formed a lot.”
“I think people are scared to take this jump, to do something outside the status quo. But that’s how we’re going to experience the Lord working in our lives, when we take that jump and do the hard and scary thing,” she said. “God gave me the grace to give him the small gift of a year of my life, and he truly returned it to me a hundredfold.”
