Taking a gap year wasn't in the plan.
First year mech eng was good, actually. I liked the problem sets. I liked that there were right answers, or at least right methods. But somewhere around exam block in November, I kept noticing a feeling I couldn't shake: I was optimising for grades in a program I wasn't sure I wanted to be in, toward a career I hadn't thought that carefully about.
That's not a crisis. Plenty of people do exactly this, successfully. But it felt worth at least examining.
The decision to defer was less "I have a vision" and more "I have a strong suspicion I should check." I'd been interested in climate for a while — in the abstract way you can be interested in something without having a clear idea what to do about it. When a role came up at a climate tech VC through a connection, it felt like a useful data point to collect.
Six months in, some things are clearer. I want to do commerce next year, not engineering. I'm more interested in how capital allocates toward hard problems than in designing the solutions to those problems directly. Those are useful things to know.
But I want to be honest about what a gap year is and isn't. It's not a magic clarity machine. I've traded one set of uncertainties for a different, more interesting set. What I've mostly gained is a bit of evidence about what I'm drawn to, and slightly more confidence that the uncertainty is worth sitting with rather than running from.
I don't think gap years are for everyone. If you know what you want, staying the course is probably better — momentum is real and losing it has costs. But if you're running on momentum you don't fully understand, pausing to look at it is underrated. The cost is usually lower than it feels, and the information is usually worth having.