Gap year stereotypes make me want to chunder

Gap Yah. It’s a term that gets bandied about a lot. It wasn’t until recently, however, that I was aware of the dangers of saying you had taken a gap year. Whilst talking to a guy on the U1 about the month I spent in Kenya working with children, he interrupted me: “Oh God, you didn’t go on a gap yah did you?”

For the record, no I didn’t. It was a summer project. But since then I’ve heard the term ‘gap year’, or ‘gap yah’, take on increasingly negative connotations, rather than the light-hearted joke I originally took it to be. But why? Apparently these days the gap year is seen as a way for posh kids to bum around for a year at the expense of Mummy and Daddy. While I’m sure these people do exist, they aren’t a species I’ve come across.

I always saw the gap year as something to be proud of. What better way to learn a new language than to live in a country that speaks it? You can spend it learning a new skill, meeting fascinating people, volunteering out in a third-world country and making change happen yourself rather than just throwing money at a charity where half of it gets spent on administration costs anyway.

And not every gap year is at the expense of parents. Some gappers work for half a year, just so they can spend the rest of the year working abroad to earn money or experience, possibly in something they hope to pursue after university, helping them make vital future career decisions. They learn about how to save their money, a stark contrast to some freshers I knew who squandered away their student loan on purple every week. Why criticise someone spending their hard-earned money on what they want to do?

Matt Lacey, aka Orlando, has said that the clip is “a satire on the great number of people who seem to be leaving these shores to vomit all over the developing world.” But remember: for every chundering idiot, there’s a student taking a gap year to do something useful with their time, and having experiences they will take with them for the rest of their lives.