Ask HN: What would you do with a year off?

I've successfully learned Chinese fluently. Spending a year hanging out in a nicer part of the mainland while working through books and paying a teacher for 1-on-1 lessons a few days a week (~100CNY=$16/hr) should get you conversational. I strongly recommend considering Yunnan: good standard Mandarin, excellent weather, friendly people, good food, many points of interest. Americans can now get 10 year visas easily, though you have to exit the country every 90 days. This means you don't have to tie yourself to a formal school and its (slow, tedious) pace, plus gives you a reason to travel. Yunnan has great options for the border hops on the cheap: Myanmar and Vietnam (visa available in Kunming) and Laos (visa on arrival) are right next door, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Thailand (visa on arrival) are also close.

Thanks! Being a minor restricts a lot of my options as far as being in less-developed countries for too long (liabilities, etc.), but it's something I'm interested in.

Any suggestions for specific places to go?

If you need to take time, do. If you don't need to, don't. That's the most I can say on that matter. I didn't go to school in the traditional sense, so whatever makes sense for you makes sense.

What made the year off sort of a zero sum was that I had roughly enough cash to last roughly a year, but at about the halfway point I started looking for areas that I wanted to relocate to and worked on securing employment there. The stress of re-entering the workforce undid some of the decompression from leaving the corporate world in the first place.

It was a great period for figuring out just what I wanted to do and what really mattered in life. If I had to do it again, I'd have more FU money, or at least have a more solid income stream that wasn't wholly dependent on me being at an office for ~8 hours a day.

Lessons were learned, some easy, some hard. Plans are in action so that history won't repeat itself so closely next time I decide I need some time off.

The most important thing to do with your gap year is to really thing about what you actually want to do with the next few years of your life. Chances are you've never really thought about it.

Certainly I just assumed that since I did really well in high school, enjoyed physics and got into a good school then studying Physics at University must be the right thing do. Since this matched up with all social expectations and since everybody around me told me that this was a really good idea, I never really questioned it. To cut a long story short, it probably wasn't the right thing to do then, and I ended up miserable and crashing out.

So whatever you do end up doing with your time, take the luxury to throw out any pre-conceived notions of what you should do and really reflect over what you want to do.

Undergrad time in college is the perfect chance to explore and figure out what you want to do. I would recommend starting school, and taking a lighter course load including some things you might not take otherwise. I was a mechanical engineering major in college, but I wish I had taken more CS classes. If you have the means then plan to spend 4.5-5 years finishing school, or save your money so that you have more options after you finish college.

I took about half a year off before grad school, and I loved it. For me that was much more valuable than if I had done something similar before undergrad. If you are interested, I spent my time off on a road trip across the US. My wife and I camped the entire time except for a few days with friends and 3 nights in hotels when we need some recovery time. It included a lot of hiking including up to 15 days straight on the trail.