As my final year of high school was coming to an end, I saw all my friends talking about college and sending in applications. I, therefore, decided to do the same. I don’t remember having thought of why I was doing it then, I just did. Being in a hostel, college applications were one reason why we were allowed to use the computer and that seemed enough of a reason for me then. Many times I had caught myself filling in the form, writing up all the personal information details, however, every single time it came to choosing a course and selecting out my interests, I would stop, I would be stuck. Every single time. A friend suggested Liberal Arts, I looked that up but even there I found interests compartmentalised in ways in which I couldn’t choose. I don’t know about others, but 4 years for me was a long period of commitment and ‘just doing something for the sake of it’ didn’t make sense to me. I knew that I’m not the kind who would be able to push herself for that long without having a sustained interest.

I was really confused but also didn’t know of an alternative then. I then started thinking about taking a gap year, and given that the idea of gap years wasn’t exceptional in my school it was easy. I had a senior who was then in her gap year and who spoke to me about her experience and also shared a website which listed 40 interesting places where you could volunteer travel in India.

I think my entire journey started there when I saw the website. I saw things far more interesting and experientially rich than any of the college courses I was reading about. I was told to not really make a plan, “Just think of step one Ayushi and from thereon things will just happen, you’ll meet people and you’ll know what to do.” I wasn’t too sure of that, also that wasn’t enough to convince myself and my parents on the fact that I won’t be ‘wasting time’. I then made a list of things I could do, places where I could volunteer and learn and different fields I could explore. I mailed that to my father, giving him a pretext, explaining the situation and assuring him that no way is this year gonna go for waste and if ever I’m stuck with nothing to do, I could always pick one item off the list and head down there and work. Explaining it to my parents for me fortunately wasn’t hard at all! And once that was done, I knew this is what I wanted to do, take time out for myself cause clearly the mainstream alternative of college wasn’t working out.

Then started one of my best and growing years. The first month I joined French classes, hoping it would be helpful when I visit France the following month. I for very long wanted to try horse riding, so I also joined horse riding classes and learnt a bit of krav maga over the weekends.

Then I went on my Europe trip. After the Europe trip, there were a couple of months I was just at home. In no way I regret it. I feel that the time was needed because I feel somewhere I really needed that time as a break and I also learnt a lot during that time. Most importantly my communication skills. By this time I was kind of sure of my interests in environmental science however that in itself is very vast and just saying environmental science was very vague because I came to realize that it could be done in various ways like working in a company or in a forest or for waste management or for simply the conservation of a single species etc. So I decided to try out different organizations/ streams working towards it and see where I felt a part of and also if this interest was real or just a fancy. So during this time while exploring further, I stayed in Gurukula botanical sanctuary in Wayanad for a short duration and during Jan 2018 I volunteered for 25 days in the sadhana forest.

During February I volunteered in a school for specially-abled people, called Prayatna. Over the month of March, I was back home where I was volunteering for an initiative called ‘give paperback’ where a friend of mine and I would go to different schools, colleges asking them to give their used books which would be used to recycle and make new books to be given to children in the villages to be able to reduce their educational cost.

Eventually, the year came to the month of May-June back to when I was stuck a year ago. Again the academic years were coming to an end and college applications had started. I was sure I wanted to pursue and learn more along with the interests of conservation / environmental science. However, due to not having a science educational background, taking that course up seemed nearly impossible in India for me. Also, I was sure that an educational system that was more liberal and open would be something more suitable for me. I did find a college which fulfilled both these criteria and were working on interests and experiential learning rather than certified qualifications and attendance. However, due to certain reasons, the course for that year didn’t start. I was also very sure then that I wouldn’t want to do college just for the ‘sake’ of it or simply for a degree. That idea didn’t seem enticing enough to me, especially after having taken a year to figure that aspect out and to run back in the track with the crowd just didn’t seem appealing at all. But then there was also a concern that my parents had that I should nowhere regret this decision or feel helpless on not having a degree, especially given that all the friends who had taken a gap year as well had joined colleges. Therefore we settled on trying college out and see how it works. I joined one close to home thinking it would give me more time and space to do things beyond college.

It was during the initial days of my college that I had also made a trip to Spiti valley. I volunteered in the ‘Greening the Desert’ programme by the Spiti Ecosphere where we built an ecologically sustainable greenhouse for a house in the top remote villages to cut the carbon footprint involved in transporting vegetables to the remote areas of the mountain, also enabling the villagers to be self-sufficient in their need for food. College wasn’t very exciting for me. I constantly felt like it’s a waste of time. I felt I had been more productive the previous year and was working on things of my interest and work that made sense to me and which produced results that I could see. In college, hours would be wasted cause the teacher wouldn’t show up, or I would be threatened to attend classes on basis of my low attendance, even for subjects which I felt could be done and didn’t require me to attend classes for separately. A lot of times students attended classes because it would be taken by the head of the department and the entire attitude of threatening and using fear (of attendance) and authority as means of keeping the students in class instead of making the classes more interesting and informative didn’t suit me well. I felt that in college the students were not treated as individuals and with respect. The fact that a question or a problem could be solved only in one way suggested by the teacher seemed odd to me, especially when I could see that clearly in a class of 120 at least 20 brains could effectively provide 20 different solutions for them. However, having the teacher have the last say in all matters seemed unreasonable.. Also, another major problem was the strength of the class. It felt like we were herds of sheep rammed into a classroom. And after the gap year, I guess it had gotten way more clearer for me that the mainstream style of education was probably something that would not work for me.

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