We all know what a gap year is, but everyones’ ideas of a successful gap year are different.

To some it’s a break before they have to get their head down, be it in work or at university; the calm before the storm. To others it’s an opportunity to expand their CV or get some work experience. Your gap year is whatever you want it to be, it’s literally a year of freedom from the formulaic routine of formal education and work. But, for most people a gap year comes before university, when this might not be the right decision. 

A gap year before university is a beneficial idea for many a reason, but sometimes it can hinder you without you even realising. If you’ve got your heart set on taking a year to yourself, but you’re unsure about whether to jump into your final three years of education, this post will list the 8 reasons a post-uni gap year is good, and bad, so you can decide for yourself if taking a gap year before or after university is right for you. 

Money

Lets be real, this is the deciding reason why most people take or don’t take a gap year, be it post degree or not. This is also the deciding factor in what you get up to on your gap year, be it travelling, working, volunteering, relaxing, or whatever else it is you want to do. Either way, when you’re planning a gap year you have to take a serious look at your financials and decide what’s within your reach.  This is especially important because most ‘voluntourism’ schemes abroad will need you to pay (usually very high prices) upfront, even to do volunteering.

This is the first ‘con’ of the post-uni gap year; it might be a stretch in this sense. After graduation a lot of students are lumped with debts-student loans, or a student overdraft, and going straight into work is of course the best way to remedy this. If you’re planning on focusing on learning at university, meaning you don’t want to work during your studies, then a gap year before uni might be best for you. Remember, if you’re savvy enough and if it’s what you want to do, you can work on your gap year even while travelling, whether you decide to take it before or after you graduate. 

However, thats not to say that if you’re frugal with your money during uni you can’t save up more than enough cash to spend a year away. You have more time to earn and save in uni, and you can stretch your student maintenance payments a long way, or even consider putting some in savings. As well as this most university towns have a good market for student jobs, meaning if you’re willing to put the work in you can make a lot of disposable income. However, balancing your studies with work can become quite tricky, especially as a lot of employers aren’t very understanding of this.

Time

It’s no secret that A Levels are hard, and a gap year before university is certainly a well earned break – especially as it’s is a big step in a lot of people’s lives and can seem intimidating.

A second con surrounding a post-uni gap year is the daunting question of will you be able to get back on the grind after a years break? Obviously, since most students immediately go into work or further education after university, a gap year after this doesn’t cross most students minds. Taking a long break may push you off your life path or plan that you had worked out while doing your degree, and if you’re planning on working in your chosen field then all your education won’t be so fresh in your head. 

But, on the other side of the coin, a good thing about taking a gap year after university is that it can give you more time to decide whats right for you. I know myself and my friends were no more sure about where we wanted to end up after uni, than we were after A Levels. University, while it can seem intimidating to the A Level student, is not as hard as it may seem, and it might not be worth taking a whole 12 months off just to split up your education. Instead taking a gap year post-uni means that you get the chance to finish your education entirely, and take a break before working for the rest of your life. This also means you get much more flexibility because you’ve already got your degree, so if you decide you absolutely hate volunteering at the monkey sanctuary in Cambodia, you can come home and start working straight away. Your post-uni gap year doesn’t even have to be a year, perhaps one or two months will do you. Before university you don’t really have this freedom since your life is still running on the school calendar.

Sociability 

The one downside in this area is that if you take a gap year after university and don’t travel or do further qualifications, then your friends will most likely all be in work, or away doing other things. Unless you can convince someone to take the break with you, you might have to go it alone. That’s definitely not a bad thing to some people, as a gap year can be the perfect way to work out who you are and what you want out of the rest of your life. But if you’re a social butterfly then you might have to put some thought into how a gap year after uni will affect you. 

Of course, it’s easy to get around this con, go to classes and meet new friends, or make them on the road! You could even argue that if you went straight into a new job and didn’t take a gap year that your social life would suffer, or that if you took one before university then all your friends would have left anyway…to go to university!

A gap year after university however, can be handy in terms of sociability. Campus life allows you to learn new social and life skills, and expand your mind with education. It’s the first time you get to discover yourself as an adult, which means you can then go and see the world with a vastly different set of eyes than you might have now, after your A Levels. This also means that you can make a more informed decision about where you want to go, and what you want to do, or what you want to learn or experience after your degree. Taking a gap year after university also means you don’t have to feel like you’re part of the group of A Level students who volunteered-we had a few and they all seemed to get lumped into that same stereotype. 

Employability 

The question of ‘should I take a gap year after university’ is very reliant on what your job prospects are. Many people have jobs lined up after graduation that can’t be delayed, so it’s definitely easier to defer university for a year than it is your career. At the end of the day, until you’ve done your degree you won’t know what your job future is, meaning if you don’t take a gap year after A Levels then you might miss out on one altogether in favour of working. It’s also an unfortunate truth that some employers think of it as a bad thing, especially since it’s much more widely accepted to take a gap year pre-university. So, be prepared to answer interview questions about why you took a year off. 

Don’t worry, it’s not so hard to spin a post-uni gap year into something that can enhance your employability. You can definitely travel and still continue your education, through online sources or in person, or you can teach abroad, or combine the two and work abroad, gaining work experience and life experience at the same time. There are definitely employers out there who will think of it as a good thing, and see that just because you took a well earned break after university doesn’t mean that you’re incapable of hard work. It can show that you’re an entirely more worldly and experienced person than you were before, and can give you confidence you didn’t know you had.

What are you Shaping your Life to be?

Even though it might render this article pointless, whether or not you decide a post-uni gap year is the one for you, the decision will be based on your own wants and needs. Do you want to travel, or work, or learn, or a combination of the three? Where do you want to bookend your life? A good question to ask yourself is whether you see university as an extension of your education thus far, or as an entirely different part of your life? If you lean more toward the first option then a break after uni might be right, whereas if you see uni as the next step, then a break beforehand might be best. The time-off that comes along with your gap year can act as a way to close a certain chapter, while providing you with a chance to relax and better yourself, so deciding whether to do it before or after uni rests on where you want to take that year out from your calendar. 

If you’re a uni student reading this then you’ve most likely missed your chance at taking a gap year before uni, so while the decision may seem smaller, it still carries a lot of weight for your life story. It’s very true that the number of people swapping a gap year before uni for after is rising, and the number of people taking gap years at all is falling, but as you have hopefully seen there are good and bad points about both. The decision about whether to take your gap year before or after university is entirely your own, which means it’s almost impossible to make the wrong one.