As someone who didn’t have the family financial backing to help pay tuition, I knew that the gap years would not only give me a deeper understanding of what I wanted to study but provide me with an edge to compete for scholarships I needed to attend university.

Gap years are necessary for growing and understanding ourselves as young adults and this decision should not penalize us when we apply to college later. In this article, I covered the roadblocks gap year/non-traditional students face when they return to college and shared my own personal experience dealing with a system that feels quite punitive to students who deviate from the high-school-to-college pipeline.