Should You Take a Year Off After Graduation?

You'd like to take a few months or even a year after college to do something off the beaten career path, but you're worried about the effect on your job prospects after your self-imposed sabbatical is over. Take heart: Such a break can often be empowering and beneficial to your career. "If an employer thinks you wasted a year by biking in Eastern Europe or tutoring children at a homeless shelter, then why would you want to work for that employer?" says Jerry Houser, director of the Career Development Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. Besides, says Colleen Kinder, author of Delaying the Real World: A Twentysomething's Guide to Seeking Adventure, potential employers will just as likely respect your decision as question it. "I gathered the stories and tips of over a hundred young adventurers for Delaying the Real World," says Kinder, a 2003 Yale graduate who after graduation lived in Cuba, traveled throughout Latin America and volunteered with the elderly. "So many of them stressed how much their unconventional experiences have benefited their careers." Time Off Shouldn't Be Just a Vacation But unconventional shouldn't mean unproductive. Investing your time, energy and money in traveling abroad, volunteering or otherwise expanding your horizons can pay career dividends if you learn about yourself along the way. "Learn what makes you happy, sad, angry, hopeful; learn about your integrity, how you make decisions, how you interact with others, because [as an employer], I'm going to ask you about these," says Steven Levy, principal of Huntington Bay, New York-based Outside-the-Box Consulting, a human resources development company. Scott Dinsmore has plenty of answers for any interviewer. A 2004 graduate of the University of California-Santa Barbara, Dinsmore spent last year in Sevilla, Spain, where he not only taught English to native Spanish-speaking professionals but also launched and ran a business around his instructional activities. Now he's searching for a consulting job in the San Francisco Bay Area, and his Spain experiment is only helping his cause. "So far, the interviewers and people I've met with have been very impressed with what I did last year and the experience that I was able to create for myself," says Dinsmore.