As a kid, time-out is a steep punishment. But in college, some students welcome a break from Northwestern’s pre-professional tunnel vision.
Medill senior James Levy left Evanston for a warmer California winter last year for his Teaching Magazine internship, and stayed in the sunny state after being offered a job through the summer at Facebook to help develop applications. “I was living walking distance from the office and met Mark Zuckerberg and other senior Facebook people,” Levy says. “If you’d asked me last fall, I would’ve had no idea that that was what I’d be doing.”
Taking a quarter off can be a healthy experience, and may even refocus students when they get back to school, says Keri Disch, director of student life at Medill. “This looks like such a high-pressure environment,” she says. “Students spend so much time swimming with their heads below the water they don’t get a chance to look around.”
Communication senior Mary Healy, though, felt she had to leave campus to be submerged. When she took last Winter Quarter off, she donned scuba gear and observed the coral reef from an island in the Philippines.
Looking for a service-oriented trip, Healy crafted a DIY study abroad experience after failing to meet Northwestern’s language requirement to go to Spain. “It was a completely different education than I could have received in a classroom at NU or anywhere else,” Healy says.
Once you’ve come up with a game plan, the rest is just administrative protocol: filling out a withdrawal notice requiring approval from a school dean, the housing and loan offices, and setting a return date.
AP credits and the flexible quarter system make graduating on time possible, but it takes planning and communicating with advisors. “We help paint the consequences of staying or going,” Disch says. “If there’s concern about the leave due to the challenges of curriculum, we do our best to make sure the student is aware of any ripple effects.”
Whether they’re buying the plane tickets or just providing unconditional love, parental approval is key when you’re thinking of skipping school for a while. “At first they were skeptical,” Healy says. “Then my parents became so supportive once they realized I wasn’t just trying to live on a beach and bum around.”
And hey, some parents are fine with that. Tyler Lorenzi, a McCormick junior, was a “ski bum” this past winter in Vail, Colo., where he skied five days a week and worked as a valet doorman. He was scared his mom wouldn’t be on board, but she actually encouraged him to go. Now Lorenzi is starting to plan a similar trip to California – to be a beach bum, of course. New climate, same lifestyle.
But transitioning from bumming around to the bump and grind of schoolwork can be tricky. “Everyone I talked to joked I wouldn’t come back,” Lorenzi says, “but that definitely wasn’t a question. It was just a learning experience.”
