Alumni Meghan Kalck that graduated with the 2023 class took a different route than going directly to college after she left high school.
Kalck said she knew “college wasn’t for [her], but [she] still wanted to learn.” Kalck was a part of the Education First (EF) GAP year program. She was fulfilling her dreams of “traveling the world and seeing new cultures.”
The program gives students the options of where they would like to go, how long, and what they want to focus on learning while away. Kalck chose to go away for 10 weeks.
Kalck called the GAP year management that helped her pick her program. She said they assisted her with picking the “explorer program which was two weeks of guided exploration in four European cities, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona, four weeks of language in a chosen city… and then finally four weeks of service and sustainability in different parts of Thailand.”
Kalck said she took different types of classes while she was traveling. In Barcelona her focus was to learn more Spanish. Kalck loved the classes because there was “no English whatsoever; directions are in Spanish, assignments are in Spanish, lectures are in Spanish.”
She earned a “certificate of completion for [her] Spanish course in Spain which is something [she] never gets rid of.”
The NH graduate said Barcelona was an “amazing place to live because after the first few days of commuting to school [she] felt like a local.” She said she could navigate the city without having to use google maps.
Also, the people “at the little coffee shop next to [her] school started to recognize [her] whenever she came in for coffee before her classes.” According to Kalck, the people of Thailand “are always friendly,” walking down the street “everyone is smiling and just overall happy.”
Learning about the different cultures of all the different places she went to was one of the main parts of the trip to Kalck. Her favorite one she learned about was “the Thai,” because “the way they live life is so similar to the way [she] aspires to live.” She explored lots of “temples and learned about Buddhism.”
The program also had service projects that Kalck and the rest of her cohort had to participate in. Each project lasted five days.
The first one she was a part of was in Krabi with “NatureMind-ED where [they] learned all about sustainability and nature.” Kalck had to rock climb on real rocks barefoot where she learned “about energies flowing through [their] bodies and how to have that help [them].” Also, in Krabi she did a lot of hiking and kayaking. While kayaking she “collected mangrove saplings and then later [they] planted those in the mangrove sanctuary.”
The program had the group taking “traditional Thai longboats to different islands where [they] learned about the coral reef.”
Her second service project was “definitely [her] favorite,” which was in Koh Lanta with a program called “following giants.” Kalck got to follow around wild elephants and make “vitamin balls for them and [the cohort group] also helped with reforestation by making seed balls that [they] launched into the jungle with slingshots.” She also got to make paper out of elephant poop, “which is not as gross as it sounds,” she promises. She got to finish off this service project with a hike to a waterfall “where [they] got to swim.”
In Chiang Mai in Thailand where she worked at the schools with the kids was her last service project. Kalck said, “the kids loved [them] because they don’t get exposed to alot of tourism where they are from.” Kalck built a “mushroom house and built a garden for the school with the help of the kids and [she] learned so much from those three days from the kids about how they live.” She also got to play “games with the kids like volleyball and soccer.”
Beyond taking classes when she was studying abroad, Kalck also had time to go tour the places. Kalck shared that her cohort of people that were doing the same program as her “quickly became family ever since day one.” According to Kalck the group she was traveling with is already planning on having a reunion with each other.
The friends she made with her cohort group is “better than any amount of friends that [she] made in high school because [they] all just clicked so fast and all of [them] got along.” She already has plans to visit one of her friends from the cohort that lives in Tennessee.
There were big adjustments for Kalck to go through such as being away from her family for 10 weeks, and having to adjust to the time differences each time she traveled somewhere new. But the graduate explained “adapting to time was fairly easy.” She only struggled with her first “two days in London were a bit of a struggle.”
Kalck’s family was supportive with her decision to go explore her dreams of traveling. She explained she “loves [her] family but [she] also loved being on [her] own and that is something that [her family] knew, and they were very supportive.”
During Kalck’s senior year at North Harford she felt stressed because of the other seniors talking about where they were going to college and their majors. It stressed her out because she knew she “didn’t want to go to college but everyone seemed to have everything planned out and [she] felt like [she] was doing something wrong.”
Community college was a thought in her mind of doing instead of the GAP year. She said she would have only picked going to HCC to “feel in place,” with the other students her age. But she is “so glad she didn’t,” give up the chance to travel the world.
Now that Kalck’s program is finished and she is back home in Harford County she knows what she wants to do in the future. She also gained a different perspective than what she had back during her senior year. She knows now “it is okay not to know,” what you want to do.
Kalck said “you don’t need to jump into college right away if it’s not something you want.” She wants everyone to know to “take your time, figure it out, and do the things you want while you can because sometimes the best things in life come unplanned.”
