Maya Oralevich: Israel

Instead of pursuing the traditional 4-year college pathway, Maya Oralevich has her eyes set on a gap year overseas. Over the course of her gap year, Oralevich will be participating in Bar Ilan XP, a gap year program located in Israel, to pursue her interests in medicine. During this time, she will get to experience more hands-on work in the medical field as opposed to classroom-based projects. “I’m planning on majoring in pre-med and I thought (the program) was cool because I get to see medicine from a different perspective, without going straight into school and not really knowing what I like and why I want to do it,” Oralevich said. “You volunteer a few times with your hospital, intern and help kids.”

Oralevich hadn’t always planned on taking a gap year. “At first I was like, ‘I’m supposed to go to college. What if I come back and don’t feel studious or lose all my study skills?’” she said. “But this program tried to recruit me. They said, ‘You’ll make friends. You’ve got to break off. You’ve got to explore things. You’re not losing education—you’re actually gaining it because you get to see (things) from a different perspective.’ So I was like, ‘Oh, let’s try it.’”

In terms of the future, she has had to be careful about which college to commit to, as not all schools are lenient on deferment. “Something that I regret not doing is checking if schools allow you to defer because some of the schools that I really liked and got into don’t allow it,” Oralevich said. “After you commit to a school, you submit a deferment application and then they let you know by a certain date if they confirmed it. For certain schools, it’s riskier, but for others, it’s 100% okay.”

In the end, Oralevich is excited to take a much-needed break from formal education while still pursuing her interests. “I’m just looking forward to having a break from school,” she said. “It’s going to be motivating for me to see how much medicine is used all around the world and then go into college.

—Written by Katie Shih