Apply for Grad School with Me: learn along with me in this series as I navigate each step of the grad school application process. I don’t have all the answers and I can’t promise success, but I’ll share what I learn as I go. Feel free to contribute in the comments with what you’ve learned along the way!

Let’s Call It a Gap Year

I finished my bachelor’s degree at the end of 2020. To be fair, that was a bad year to be doing anything or being anyone – but to state the obvious, it made for a bad senior year. Spending the year so close but so far from the UT campus and writing a senior thesis with no access to books, on top of all the anxiety and uncertainty we were all feeling about COVID, police violence and hate crimes in the U.S., natural disasters, and no yeast in the store for self-placating bread-baking*, left me feeling pessimistic about jumping into more education. I decided to wait on grad school applications until I knew I could attend somewhere in person.

To make it sound more intentional, I retroactively called this time a “gap year.” I spent all of 2021 in this gap, and I’m finishing it up now by applying to programs and taking some last-minute steps to make myself more competitive for them. Here are some of my takeaways from that experience, as well as some strategies I learned to use the gap time wisely.

Taking gap time is okay

When I started looking into master’s programs seriously, I was worried that the time I took off would seem unprofessional and unimpressive. The more I learned about the admissions process, though, the more I realized that taking some time after graduating rather than jumping straight into grad school can actually be a good move, and can even make you stand out from other applicants in a positive way.

The panel in this webinar hosted by the Linguistics Society of America a few years ago discussed some advantages to taking a break before grad school, including:

• Being less vulnerable to burnout. Grad school involves a lot of hard work, and jumping straight into it after another degree can make you lose motivation fast. Taking a break can show a committee that you know what you’re getting into by the time you apply.
  
• Coming across as intentional. Similarly, the panel said that in some cases, an application right after graduation can seem like a sort of directionless “next step,” where taking some time between degrees can show that your decision to apply is well thought out and that your research interests are more solidified.
  
• Showing unique experience. When an applicant has spent their gap time gaining some relevant or just interesting real-world experience, they stand out from some applicants whose experience is only in a university context.

Using gap time to your advantage

About that unique and relevant experience. That’s not easy to get when entry-level jobs aren’t entry-level and face-to-face interaction is still not advisable. These are just the things I’ve learned and started doing that made my gap year not look like wasted time. No idea if they result in success yet.

• Tutor. I majored in linguistics and German, and I was able to tutor a middle school student in her German class over Zoom in the semester after I got my BA. I did it independently and worked with her parents rather than her school, but I think it would have been possible to work through a school or tutoring organization. My experience was that it kept the knowledge from my classes fresh and gave me a chance to stretch my teaching muscles.
  
• Hunt for internships. When I was having no luck with job applications and interviews, my professor gave me an amazing tip: look at job offers that I’m not qualified for, find an email associated with the offer, and email them asking if they do internships and lower-level jobs. I subscribed to a daily update from the Linguist List in the middle of last year, and contacted someone just about every time a job was posted on it. Doing that landed me an (awesome) internship with Living Tongues last year, and a mini-seminar experience with Virtual NYI starting next week. Unlike other job listings, too, everyone who didn’t have anything for me noticed and actually replied to my emails.
  
• Jobs. This one is obvious and is maybe the best form of experience because you get paid for it but it hasn’t worked out for me at all and I’m still bitter about it, so I have nothing helpful to say.
  
• Take classes and learn on your own. After graduating from a university where I had access to lots of diverse classes and higher education, I realized there were gaps in my knowledge that I needed to fill if I wanted to make it in grad school. Mostly more statistics/probability and programming for data visualization and computational linguistics. With some of the extra time I have because of not having a JOB, I’ve been trying to supplement that with some free Coursera courses and reading. I also signed up for a remote data analysis and visualization bootcamp at UT the other day, after which I of course saw a video on my YouTube feed titled something like “4 inexpensive ways to learn to code that are BETTER THAN BOOTCAMP.” It didn’t help my confidence. What I’m still hoping will make the expensive bootcamp worth it is the certificate at the end and the more impressive application for more technical programs.

There are some other things I’ve learned during my gap time that I’m hoping will help me in the application process, and I plan to get to those in future posts coming soon. Compiling everything for this one made me feel better about having taken gap time, and I hope it does that for someone else too. I hope I can help others in the application process by sharing how I’m stumbling through it myself!

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* And a stressful election year full of insane conspiracy theories and international tension and overfull hospitals and mass shootings and protests and literal murder hornets and celebrities singing Imagine in their mansions and no toilet paper and