Members of Class of 2016 To Take Gap Years

Several students from the class of 2016 will take a gap year, which is typically a year-long break between high school and college. Most students plan on traveling to other countries and working or volunteering. Some are using the year to prepare for division one college level athletics by playing at the junior level.

Senior Hiro Kuwana, who will attend Brown University in the fall of 2017, decided he wanted to take a gap year after his term abroad in Taiwan. He plans to go to Hawaii, Taiwan, Southeast Asia and India. He will work at a nature conservancy, a private equity firm in Japan and a solar panel company in Taiwan. He hopes to explore environmentalism and see if that is what he wants to do later on. “I’ve been in a school environment or an academic environment for my entire life, and I want to experience something different—to live on a budget by myself, in a foreign country,” Kuwana said. “It’s a different type of learning that you’ll never have here.”

“I feel like everyone should be really excited about their future and find something that they love to do, so I wish there had been more examples of what taking a gap year would look like.”

Senior Rex Tercek, who will attend Harvard University in the fall of 2017, agreed with Kuwana that a year after high school is “the perfect time to decompress” before moving on to college. He will spend the first couple of months doing biological research on an island south of Hawaii. Then he will spend two months in Patagonia on a NOLS mountaineering and kayaking trip. In the spring he plans to backpack on the Te Araroa Trail in New Zealand. “The people I do know who have taken a gap year are coming into college much more experienced and much more worldly,” Tercek said. “So I’m excited.”

Senior Zanny Merullo will spend the first part of her gap year at home with her family in Massachusetts.

“I feel like I’ve abandoned them for a while and want to reconnect,” Merullo said. “I’ve done a lot of traveling with my family, and I always liked the idea of taking some time off between high school and college.”

In February of 2017 she will go to Italy and stay in a religious cultural center. She will work with refugees and take classes at a religious university. Then she will go for a month to Nepal for a retreat. Returning to Europe, she will walk the “Camino de Santiago” or the Way of St. James. The pilgrimage route she will take is through France to the shrine of the apostle St. James the Great in northwestern Spain.

When Merullo was in ninth grade, she was too ill to attend school, and in tenth grade she decided to spend a year abroad in Italy. She came to Exeter as a new upper and has not applied to any American colleges. She said she plans to experiment in the education at the religious university in Italy and then apply to college in Italy either at the University of Bologna or Rome.

“I think I’m most nervous because I know it’s going to change my life, and I don’t know what I’m going to be like after,” Merullo said. “I’m going on this alone, and I know I’m going to have this great experience that will change my life that no one else will have in common with me and that’s kind of scary to think of.”

Senior Michaella Henry received a grant that will allow her to learn hands-on how to run a non-profit organization. Her focus will be with her own non-profit organization called BiblioNations that works to bring free public libraries to rural areas of developing countries. Her year will start in Paris, France where she will intern with Libraries Without Borders, an organization dedicated to expanding literacy in developing countries, and will learn to manage a charitable library organization. Then in Dakar, Senegal she will work as executive assistant to the founder of Empower2Play, a company which runs sports camps for select qualified students for an educational mentorship program. She will end her gap year in Fond Jean Noel, Haiti where she will meet the community, tutor English at the local school and begin to build the first public library in the area.

In addition to learning the methods of non-profit management, Henry will compare the black cultures of France, Senegal and Haiti through two projects. The first is a photo project with pictures and stories of people of African descent in France, Senegal and Haiti.

Each picture is accompanied by a short quote from the person captured which Henry described as “a deeper lens into their personal narrative.” The second project is a documentary which will compile Henry’s personal observations along with interviews with the local people of the African diaspora.

“This opportunity means so much to me and I am honored and humbled that so many people have faith in me,” Henry said. “I will not disappoint.”

Senior Noa Siegel, who will attend Syracuse University, will split her year between Spain and Chile where she plans to stay with host families. In the morning she will take Spanish classes and in the afternoon do volunteer work for the local community.

“People speak very highly of the gap year, and after four years of Exeter you kind of need a break,” Siegel said.

Four seniors will be playing junior level hockey next winter. Senior and captain Trevor Cosgrove will be playing for the Alberni Valley Bulldogs in the British Columbia Hockey League (BCHL). Cosgrove is a Colgate Raiders Men’s Hockey commit and plans to attend the university in the fall of 2017. Senior Jacob Dupont will also play in the BCHL but for the Surrey Eagles.

Senior Devin Moore will play for the Brockville Braves in the Central Canada Hockey League. Senior Ben Solin is a Harvard Crimson Men’s Hockey commit and plans to attend the university in the fall of 2017. “I’m really excited to play hockey in my home country Canada,” Dupont said.

Merullo wishes that students had more of an opportunity to talk about gap years at Exeter. She said that most people think that applying to college is the next step and it’s something that they have to do. 

“I feel like everyone should be really excited about their future and find something that they love to do, so I wish there had been more examples of what taking a gap year would look like,” Merullo said.

“I felt like I was doing something really radical even though for me it felt right.”