The Gap Year I Almost Did Not Take

I finished my engineering degree in Kumasi at 23 with a job offer already in hand from a Lagos-based infrastructure firm that I had interned with the previous year. The offer was good, the timing was sensible, and the expected next step was clear.

I was also, without having the precise language for it, completely exhausted in a way that four years of demanding study had produced and that I had not acknowledged because acknowledging it would have required stopping.

I had an idea that had been living at the edges of my thinking for about a year - a period of travel and voluntary work before beginning my professional career - that I had been dismissing on practical grounds with a consistency that, looking back, was its own kind of answer about how appealing the idea was.

The conversation with my father when I raised it was the most challenging part. He had sacrificed significantly to fund my education and the idea of a gap year, in the context of his understanding of opportunity and its scarcity, read as a casual disregard for what had been given to me.

I understood his concern and I took it seriously, which meant the decision required me to think harder about my reasons than I might have if the path had been smoother.

I deferred the job offer by twelve months, which the firm agreed to with more grace than I had expected, and spent the year in three parts: two months in Rwanda with an engineering NGO working on rural water infrastructure, three months travelling through East Africa with a loose plan and a tight budget, and seven months back in Ghana working on a community mapping project in my hometown that I had developed from scratch.

The year gave me things I could not have predicted and cannot fully quantify. It gave me a reference point for the kind of work I found most meaningful - the Rwanda project reoriented my sense of what engineering could be for.

It gave me the particular confidence of having managed uncertainty and discomfort for an extended period with limited support, which turned out to be a transferable skill. It gave me the ability, when I started the Lagos job at 24, to know something about what I was working toward and why, rather than arriving in the profession with no context for my own motivations.

The people who told me it would set me back were measuring progress by a metric that the year had taught me to question.