It’s Completely Okay to Take a Drop Year!

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We are often told that education is a weapon through which we can achieve anything in our life, to which I totally agree. The right option at the right time plays a crucial role in an individual’s career. But these decisions should be our own, based on our preferences and not influenced by the conventional means of the societal conditioning.

India is at the 139^th position out of 149 countries in happiness rate and one of the prominent reasons which in my opinion is lack of satisfaction with our jobs.

When we are at school, our parents used to tell us “10^th karlo phir life set hai” after that “12^th karlo phir life set hai.”

But what we understand later is that life is not set until and unless we do what we are good at with the right opportunity and frame of mind. It is the decisions that we have to make in order to walk on the path that we have carved for ourselves. The journey has to be completed by the individual and therefore the decisions have to be by them.

Till school days we have a fixed schedule which we follow with our closed eyes but our career journey starts after 12^th and we should be wise enough to take our decisions and choose what exactly we want to do.

In Israel, after schooling student joins army to learn discipline and after few years they travel world and explore different career options, then they choose what they exactly want to do in life. We as a students need to understand that there are many options available for us to pursue even if we take a drop year, just to explore certain fields of interest.

The list of things which you can pursue in your drop year and will be somehow benefitting in your career: -

1.)  When we are in undergraduate college, we learn the theoretical part of our subject and don’t have the knowledge of how we will be applying it in real life scenario so for that between your undergraduate and postgraduate college try to do some sort of internships just to learn
your subjects better.

2.)  Take a travel break, explore things, replenish your energy and then bounce back in your career.

3.)  Focus more on networking, communicate with others, find your mentor as they will help you in finding your interest.

4.)  Do some short-term courses just to enhance your skills, I am not only counting coding courses in it but in which your interest lies down. It can be related to anything.

Our career is like a roller coaster, it has both trough and ridges. But our role is to keep it as smooth and enjoyable as we can. On this note I would like to put my pen down and comment section is all yours, let us know what else we can do in our drop year and would help us in our career.