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Career Development And Counseling : Putting Theory And Research

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Many high school seniors claim to be burned out from excessive academic study by the time they graduate high school, and so jumping into a demanding intellectual environment such as college seems to them to be a daunting prospect. An excellent alternative to going to college immediately is for the student to take a gap year. A gap year is a year in between graduating from high school and entering college in which a student may learn and grow in ways they otherwise couldn’t if they were in a college classroom. M. L. Savickas explains this transition further in the book Career Development and Counseling: Putting Theory and Research to Work. “The transition represents an important opportunity to enact career goals, self-beliefs, and identities developed during schooling” (Savickas, 2005 pp. 42–70). Some may have apprehensions when determining if a gap year is beneficial for an individual and for society. Some could argue that an individual who takes a gap year will digress academically, or that a student who does not enroll immediately in college will not have the best chances of influencing and benefitting society. However, taking a gap year has been becoming increasingly popular recently, and is apparent in the study done in Australia; “In 1995 around 7% of high school graduates took a gap-year, 12% in 1998, 20% in 2003, and up to 22% of the
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students in 2006” (Curtis, 2014; Curtis, Mlotkowski, & Lumsden, 2012; Lumsden & Stanwick, 2012). Even though many claim that it

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