Why I’m Glad I
Took Time Off BY LAURA TOBAR
When I took a leave from classes for the fall quarter of my senior year, I didn’t expect to learn much. I decided to take time off in large part because I had struggled to balance school, work and home life while taking online classes in the spring of 2020 and felt that, for me personally, virtual college wasn’t conducive to learning the way in-person classes had been. With so little of my undergraduate career left, I wanted to make the most of my remaining time in college. So, with the hope that I’d eventually get to return to campus for the full experience of lectures, projects and collaborative work I’d come to associate with rigorous education, I chose to put learning on hold for the time being…or so I thought.
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Preoccupied with the idealized image of what my senior year could’ve been, what I mostly thought of was how I’d be missing out on the rewards of engaging in person with faculty and peers. What I didn’t consider was that learning happens in many more places than the classroom, and knowledge takes all kinds of surprising forms.
Though I was too disappointed to realize it right away, I was about to embark on an edifying journey — and what I learned last fall was as valuable to me as the wisdom I’ve acquired in traditional academic settings. The thing about classroom learning is that it eats up a lot of time. When you aren’t in class, you have readings and homework, and even when you grind your way free of a given week’s assignments, exams and papers loom. For me, the easiest way to deal with this was to devote my free moments to pursuits I already liked or that weren’t too far out of my comfort zone; I figured, best not to waste the small amount of time I had for myself on things I might not even enjoy. But in autumn 2020, liberated from the demands of coursework, I found myself with the gift of time to delve into new subjects and unfamiliar
Spring 2021
