The Space Between

The majority of Harvard applicants to medical school last year were alumni rather than seniors. This means that a lot of premeds are opting to take one or more 'gap years' before entering med school. There are rarely bad reasons for taking time off particularly if you're not sure medicine is the right thing.

So how to explore the issues and options around time off? I highly recommend perusing our alumni evaluations of Harvard medical students to get a sense of what Harvard folks have done and why they did it. Previous years' evals (a lot more than online) are in paper form in the OCS library. Another wonderful resource is Cornell's premed advising website. Their general info about time off is good but their premed alumni profiles are incredibly useful, personal narratives about the why, what, and how of time off.

These years in between go by many names: gap years, time off, slide years, post-grad years, in-between time, or living life (the last one's mine). The truth is that many alumni come to medicine as part of a career change so perhaps describing these as 'gap years' is probably not appropriate. Whatever the name, it's worth considering.