As a firm believer in feeding my wanderlust and as someone who maintains my own travel-related blog, I spend hours on end drawing inspiration from other fellow travel-bloggers and “life-livers.” Yes it’s great to have a platform over which to share my own travel stories, my points of view and my travel dreams, but it’s always nice to be able to entertain the one topic I’m most passionate about from the point of view of other travellers and travel bloggers as well.
On one such occasion when I was just sniffing around the web, searching for a bit of inspiration, I came across an article about a survey done in which Brit youths were asked about their views on taking a gap year. So apparently 37% of British students would love to take a gap year before pursuing their university studies, but simply can’t due to financial constraints.
Look, I can appreciate the fact that any conducted survey could never lay claim to the results thereof depicting a 100% accurate view of the population, the UK student population in this particular instance, but surely there are way more students than a mere 37% who’d jump at the chance of taking a gap year?
I’ve been a student myself and to be quite honest people tend to be quite impressionable and very easily influenced at that age. You tend to see the world only by way of a very limited range of options which are presented to you at the time, so the scope of the survey should perhaps have been a bit broader in order to reach what I’d confidently proclaim to be a much more genuine representation of what students really feel about taking a gap year. What about what would effectively be a permanent gap year, for instance, which is often an idea stemming from what is ordinarily a very short-lived “traditional” gap year?
I’m not too sure I fully agree with the indicated costs of taking a gap year either, especially if that year off is taken before pursuing one’s university studies as opposed to waiting until you’ve qualified. Look, you’d obviously not be expecting to jet around the world in premium luxury – part of having the mindset of a student does indeed entail developing the ability to stretch each pound as far as possible.
Some in-between periods when you’re back home and crashing in your own bedroom at your parents’ house counts as part of your gap year too and between that and making it your business to sniff out extensive travel-related savings on platforms such as My Voucher Codes, the much-coveted gap year can be much, much cheaper.
Group gap-year travels could make each student’s travel budget go even further so there are more savings on offer, even if only 37% had ambitions of taking a gap year and indicated not having the finances to afford it.
