Gap Year

Dear Mr. Fitzsimmons,

I am Max Novendstern, a recently admitted student to the Class of 2011. I wish to take a year off before entering college, and I am writing this letter to request that my admittance to Harvard College be deferred to the fall of 2008.

During my time, I plan to immerse myself in Latin America – its culture, language, history and scholarship. I have made arrangements to stay with a family friend in Trujillo, Peru, and from there, to travel throughout the continent: the Choquequirao ruins in Peru, the pampas of Argentina, el desierto florido of Chile. After travel, for the remainder of the year, I intend to find a job opportunity, volunteering my time somewhere in the region. Throughout the trip, I hope to read and write, with luck completing a year-long writing project of my own design.

In part, the reasons for the year off are academic. I will achieve greater proficiency in the Spanish language, learn about Latin American history and literature, and gain, before entering college, a greater understanding of a culture very different from my own. By discovering the foreign and uncomfortable, perhaps my understanding of the commonplace and unremarkable will click into greater focus. But the reasons are also spiritual. Sometimes I feel that I’m so busy searching on the road for the next better thing – the fruits of high school will be picked at college, then graduate school, then career – that I do not notice a bit of scenery that is whirling by me. During my year off I hope to spend some well-deserved time off the road that beats forever forward, and to simply enjoy, at least for a short time, the smiles of the people that I meet.

Bill Gates said to Harvard’s graduating class that there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from them. After a year of “exploring, living, studying, traveling,” all suggested as revelatory in your wonderful article Time Out or Burn Out, I hope to gain a greater sensitivity to the pains and hopes of others, but also to the talents and opportunities that I have been gifted. I believe that I will enter college motivated to my mission by an enhanced perspective on the worlds around me and within.

Sincerely,

Max Novendstern

Note: I'm hoping to utilize this web space a lot during my travels, geographic and otherwise, so expect some layout change in the next couple of weeks, and then, eventually, photographs, maps, reading excerpts, journal entries, and essays.