Short Term Goal Vs Long Term Sacrifice?

We meet gappers, and gapper's families who are concerned that a break between high school and post secondary will produce negative results in the long run.

Short term sacrifice? Long term gain?   

Our fellow educators at the HEQCO have some interesting findings to share with you.


HEQCO

Students Who Delay Entering Postsecondary Education Not Hurt in Labour Market


An increasing number of students are delaying their entry into postsecondary education (PSE) and a new study by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) finds that delaying had no significant impact on the performance of graduates once they enter the labour market. The study found that students who delayed attending PSE fared just as well as direct entrants in most measures including unemployment rate, working in a job related to their field of study, being overqualified for their job and annual earnings.


However, delayers, especially those with a long delay, make different program choices than direct entrants. Delayers were more likely to attend college, and those who did go to university were more likely to enrol in liberal arts programs.


Project Description

Postsecondary Education Latecomers: Profile and Labour Market Outcomes of Ontario PSE Graduates uses data from Statistics Canada’s National Graduates Survey and Follow-up Survey of Graduates, complemented by data from Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey. The data include cohorts between 1982 and 2005. The study examines the demographic profile of delayed entrants, their program choices and their labour market performance. Delayers were separated into two categories, short delayers and long delayers, based upon their age at the time they obtained their first PSE credential.



Findings

In Ontario, delayers tended to be first-generation (graduates whose parents have no PSE) or Aboriginal, groups who are traditionally underrepresented in higher education. This was especially true of long delayers. In the cohort of 2005, 44% of long delayers were first-generation students, which is 20 percentage points higher than direct entrants. Also, the percentage of delayed entry graduates whose first language was neither English nor French grew from between 5-15% in the 1980s to 15-25% in the cohorts of 2000 and 2005.


Compared to their university counterparts, delayed entry college students’ choice of program was more diverse. Short delayers made program choices similar to direct entrants, while long delayers were more likely to study health, computers, architecture and engineering. They were also less likely to study education or physical and biological science programs.



While their overall labour market performance was not significantly different than direct entry graduates, the study did find that long delayers who graduate from college were more likely to be completely out of the labour force at five years after graduation.


Due to the growth in the number of students delaying entry to PSE and the province’s overall attainment goals, the author argues that delayers cannot be considered a marginal group in Ontario’s higher education system and should be of great interest to policy makers.


Postsecondary Education Latecomers: Profile and Labour Market Outcomes of Ontario PSE Graduates was written by Shuping Liu, Research Analyst for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.


For more information visit: http://www.heqco.ca/en-CA/Research/Research%20Publications/Pages/Summary.aspx?link=99

Life Hack Your Motivation!

How To Stay Motivated

 BY GLEB REYS 

It is hardly a secret that the key to successfully accomplishing one goal after another is staying motivated. There are, of course, tasks which you may not like at all, yet you find motivation to complete even them because you recognize how each particular task serves a greater goal.

How exactly do some of us manage to stay motivated most of the time? Here are just a few ideas you can try:

1) Find the Good Reasons

Anything you do, no matter how simple, has a number of good reasons behind it. Not all the tasks have the good reasons to do them seen at first sight, but if you take just a few moments to analyse them, you will easily spot something good. We also have many tasks which don’t need any reasoning at all – we’ve been doing them for so long that they feel natural.

But if you’re ever stuck with some task you hate and there seems to be no motivation to complete it whatsoever, here’s what you need to do: find your good reasons. They may not be obvious, but stay at it until you see some, as this will bring your motivation back and will help you finish the task.

Some ideas for what a good reason can be:

• a material reward – quite often, you will get paid for doing something you normally don’t like doing at all
• personal gain – you will learn something new or will perhaps improve yourself in a certain way
• a feeling of accomplishment – at least you’ll be able to walk away feeling great about finding the motivation and courage to complete such a tedious task
• a step closer to your bigger goal – even the biggest accomplishments in history have started small and relied on simple and far less pleasant tasks than you might be working on. Every task you complete brings you closer to the ultimate goal, and acknowledging this always feels good.

2) Make it fun

When it comes to motivation, attitude is everything. Different people may have completely opposite feelings towards the same task: some will hate it, others will love it. Why do you think this happens? It’s simple: some of us find ways to make any task interesting and fun to do!

Take sports for example. Visiting your local gym daily for a half-an-hour workout sounds rather boring to many of us. Yet many others love the idea! They like exercising not only because they recognize the good reasons behind it, but simply because it’s fun! At certain time of their daily schedule, they find going to gym to be the best thing to do, simply because nothing else will fit their time and lifestyle so perfectly.

Depending on how you look at it, you can have fun doing just about anything! Just look for ways of having fun, and you’ll find them!

A simple approach is to start working on any task from asking yourself a few questions:

• How can I enjoy this task?
• What can I do to make this task fun for myself and possibly for others?
• How can I make this work the best part of my day?

The answers will pop up momentarily, as long as you learn to have the definite expectation of any task being potentially enjoyable.

Some of you will probably think of a thing or two which are valid exceptions from this statement, like something you always hate doing, no matter how hard you try making it fun. I don’t want to argue – you’re probably right, and that’s why I don’t claim everything to be fun. However, most tasks have a great potential of being enjoyable, and so looking for ways to have fun while working is definitely a good habit to acquire.

3) Take different approach

When something doesn’t feel right, it’s always a good time to take a moment and look at the whole task looking for a different approach.

You may be doing everything correctly and most efficiently, but such an approach isn’t necessarily the most motivating one. Quite often you can find a number of obvious tweaks to your current approach which will both change your experience and open up new possibilities.

That’s why saying “one way or another” is so common: if you really want to accomplish your goal, there is always a away. And most likely, there’s more than one way. If a certain approach doesn’t work for you, find another one, and keep trying until you find the one which will both keep you motivated and get you the desired results.
Some people think that trying a different approach means giving up. They take pride in being really stubborn and refusing to try any other options on their way towards the goal. My opinion on this is that the power of focus is great, but you should be focusing on your goal, and not limiting your options by focusing on just one way to accomplish it it.

4) Recognize your progress

Everything you may be working on can be easily split into smaller parts and stages. For most goals, it is quite natural to split the process of accomplishing them into smaller tasks and milestones. There are a few reasons behind doing this, and one of them is tracking your progress.

We track our progress automatically with most activities. But to stay motivated, you need to recognize your progress, not merely track it.

Here’s how tracking and recognizing your progress is different: tracking is merely taking a note of having reached a certain stage in your process. Recognizing is taking time to look at a bigger picture and realize where exactly you are, and how much more you have left to do.

For example, if you’re going to read a book, always start by going through the contents table. Getting familiar with chapter titles and memorizing their total number will make it easier for you to recognize your progress as you read. Confirming how many pages your book has before starting it is also a good idea.

You see, reading any book you will be automatically looking at page numbers and chapter titles, but without knowing the total number of pages this information will have little meaning.

Somehow, it is in a human nature to always want things to happen at once. Even though we split complex tasks into simpler actions, we don’t quite feel the satisfaction until all is done and the task is fully complete. For many scenarios though, the task is so vast that such an approach will drain all the motivation out of you long before you have a chance to reach your goal. That’s why it is important to always take small steps and recognize the positive different and progress made.

5) Reward Yourself

This is a trick everyone likes: rewarding yourself is always pleasant. I’m happy to confirm that this is also one of the easiest and at the same time most powerful ways to stay motivated!

Feeling down about doing something? Dread the idea of working on some task? Hate the whole idea of working? You’re not alone in that, I’m telling you!

Right from the beginning, agree on some deliverables which will justify yourself getting rewarded. As soon as you get one of the agreed results, take time to reward yourself in some way.
For some tasks, just taking a break and relaxing for a few minutes will do. For others, you may want to get a fresh cup of coffee and even treat yourself to a dessert. For even bigger and more demanding tasks, you may want to reward yourself by doing something even more enjoyable, like going to a cinema or taking a trip to some place nice, or even buying yourself something.

Your progress may not seem to others like anything worth celebrating – but take time and do it anyway! It is your task and your reward, so any ways to stay motivated are good. The more you reward yourself for the honestly made progress, the more motivated you will feel about reaching new milestones, thus finally accomplishing your goal.

Mix and match

Now that you have these five ways of staying motivated, it is a good moment to give you the key to them all: mix and match! Pick one of the advices and apply it to your situation. If it doesn’t work, or if you simply want to get even more motivation, try another advice right way. Mix different approaches and match them to your task for best results.

Just think about it: finding good reasons to work on your task is bound to help you feel a bit better. Identifying ways to make it fun will help you enjoy the task even more. Finally, if you then plan a few points for easier tracking of your progress and on top of that agree on rewarding yourself as you go – this will make you feel most motivated about anything you have to work through.

Gleb Reys is a creator and maintainer of the Personal Development portal, where he regularly writes about successfully setting and reaching your goals through becoming more organized, productive and motivated person. Subscribe to his Personal Development blog feed.

Get OUT! ......of your comfort zone!

Have you heard this phrase: life begins at the end of your comfort zone.   April 10th was the 100th day of year the year.  Did you have resolutions?  Dreams, ideas or plans for 2013? It is never too late to pick them back up, dust those ideas off and get started again.

At mygapyear, we often work with individuals who are the most traditional (if there really is one) age for a gapper: right after high school.   We use EQ to facilitate conversations about emotional intelligence.   As we know, emotional intelligence helps us tap into personality traits, emotions and behaviours that we demonstrate always, often, sometimes or never.    In our program we create goals and experiences to assist our gappers in attaining further success in these areas.

As we continue to get to know ourselves, it can be easy to fall into the trap of our comfort zones.   Are you too comfortable? Is life passing you by, just a little? Are you feeling uninspired, dull around the edges, bored, wanting more? You may be stuck in your comfort zone…

What if we are NOT successful?   What if we ARE successful?   Before we get in our way, we have to get out of the way to ensure that we continue to grow and experience all that life, commuinty and the world has to offer!

To inspire you to move beyond your comfort zone.

Living and Learning

I read this quote this past week and it is stuck in my mind!   As spring comes, I am thinking about re-awakening my mind and body.  It is a time of renewal for many people.   We spring clean our houses, garages, maybe your body - but how about your mind?  How active has it been - or when is the last time you upgraded and re-awoken your mind.

Maybe we focus on this more in the fall when much of the population is heading to school.  As we spring into action this season, consider renewing yourself by trying something new and bringing yourself back to being passionately curious.

1. TED(x) Talks

Got 21 minutes?   Take a time out, or eat breakfast over a TED talk.  Start your morning with a side of knowledge, along with your fiber and fruit.  Here are top talks about happiness.   A fitting topic for spring, no?

2. MOOCs - Free Mass Online Open Courses

Have you tried a MOOC?  I tried my first this past winter.  It was a neat experience.  Cousera has a ton of topics offered - a new course starts practically each week!

3. Khan Academy

Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.

4. Local Library Programs

Check out what is available to you at your local library.  I have taken origami classes, explored career planning and had the opportunity to meet some interesting people in my neighbourhood

5. Volunteering

Looking to leave the world a better place?  Why not learn about your community or city through volunteering.  Clean out the local river, help out at the local food bank.....get out there and learn more through volunteering.

6.  Pretend to be a tourist in your own city

Date your city.  Get to know more about it's history and the people that walked down Main Street many decades ago.

7.  Trade a skill

Want to pick up a new hobby or skill?  Maybe you don't have the cash flow? Try Swap City  or Trade School each of these organizations runs using a barter system.


8.  Look  in your drawers

Hobby drawers - or maybe in your junk drawer or down in the basement you have a box or bin of forgotten hobbies.  Did you take up cross stitch, or  maybe stamping?   Bring it back out and get back to something that was once important to you.   Grab a book from a library or try our next suggestion to get your creative juices flowing again!

9.   Pinteresting....

You might have heard of this one a lot recently - Pinterest.  This site is a digital scrapbook that you share with friends and family.  You can pin images related to topics from fashion to food, and dyi or silly things like pictures of a dreamy guy; everything can be pinned.   Related to gap years - why not start pinning pictures of your dream travel spots?

10.  Open Culture - Open online sources are developing daily.   Have a peak here.    Loads of options are available as we move towards open cultures online.


Well - as you start to consider your plan for spring renewal in your home -think about spring cleaning your mind!   So, at the dinner table you can ask the time old question:  What did you learn today?

Forgiveness and Leadership

Posted on aboutleaders.com.  

I have had the unique pleasure of hearing this esteemed speaker and expert on leadership address several conferences and young leaders.   This is a new piece from him that seemed of interest to share.  Here is a piece he shares on forgiveness and leadership.

Drew Dudley, on forgiveness and Leadership:

I’m almost 36 years old, and I’ve been to the funerals of 15 of my friends.  I’ve been to only six weddings.

I’ve learned a lot from the people I’ve lost.

When I was 19 years old, my parents let me host the last-day-of-school party (the one that’s been recreated in countless high school comedy movies) at our place on the lake.  I remember leaning against the cottage, snapping a photo of two of my friends as they snuggled watching the sun set, and lamenting out loud how I didn’t have someone special in my life.
My friend Scott, one of those musician/athletes with the perfect left brain/right brain balance, sat quietly next to me for a moment before saying, “Drew, for a guy who has a lot going for him, you spend a lot of time talking about the things that you don’t have.”

The Person You Are

Too young to recognize the value of a friend who tells you what you need to hear instead of what you want to hear, I shot back:

“You just think I have a lot going for me!  You don’t know what it’s like to have all this pressure!

To have everyone telling you how much they expect you to accomplish in your life!  You don’t know what it’s like to try to live up to what everyone wants!”

Scott looked at me for what seemed like an awfully long time.  Finally, he said quietly, “Drew, you don’t give your friends enough credit.  We don’t care about you because of the guy that you might become one day.  We care about you because of the person you are now.  You should try doing the same thing.”
A few weeks later, Scott was rear-ended while driving our friend Tim to work.  Both of them were killed instantly.

Profoundly Valuable Lessons

When I got a job at my university bar, a young man by the name of Jason Abraham worked with me on Tuesday nights. He was tremendously well-liked on campus, and I asked him once why so many people seemed to be drawn to him.

With a laugh he told me that, “I just try to avoid doing things that might cause me to have to say ‘I’m sorry’.  I’ve found the best way to do that is simple: every time you talk about someone, act as if they’re standing directly behind you.  Your life gets exponentially better.”

In late February of 2000, Jason was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and was gone less than a month later, a few days short of his 24^th birthday.

Never diminish the person you are in the name of what you hope to become.  Speak of people in a way you’ll never be ashamed to have heard.  Two profoundly valuable lessons I learned from people who never got to become the people they were going to be.  The thirteen others that were taken too soon left me with equally important insights that shape me to this day.  I share their wisdom wherever I can, especially to remind young people to avoid a mistake I made: assuming their value to the world can only be delivered “one day” instead of today.

No Universal Measuring Unit for Pain

Recently, after a presentation where I shared some of these stories, a young woman approached me.
“Drew, I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your presentation,” she said.  “And to let you know that I feel terrible for all of the pain you’ve gone through in your life.”
We began chatting for a few minutes, and she began to share some of her own powerful stories.  She was an international student studying in British Columbia, but before she had come to Canada, war in her home country had forced her family into a refugee camp, where she lost both her parents and her grandparents to illness.
Stunned, I asked her, “How can you say you feel terrible for the pain I’ve had in my life, when yours so obviously dwarfs mine?”

“Well,” she said, “I’ve discovered that there is no universal measuring unit for pain.  Hurt just hurts.  So why bother comparing it?”

“The more important lesson I’ve learned about pain,” she continued, “is that only hurt people hurt others.  So if I want to be the type of person who does not hurt others, I have to let go of the things that have hurt me.  I have to heal.”

Only hurt people hurt others.

As I sat on the plane home after that conversation, I realized the profound implication of accepting that fundamental truth: leaders must heal in order to lead.  We have to let go of the things that have hurt us to ensure that they don’t rise up and cause pain to someone else.  I realized that meant that leaders have to forgive.

The problem is that can be tremendously difficult, because the reason we allow so many conflicts to go unresolved is because we want to win.  We feel as if someone has wronged us in some way, and though the continuing conflict sucks value from our lives, we’re not willing to finally put it to rest, to forgive, until someone acknowledges that we were right.  That we rightly “won”.

The most inspiring leaders I know aren’t interested in winning—they’re interested in succeeding.  I think it’s crucial to remember that sometimes success is not possible if we insist on winning.

There is no weakness in forgiveness.  In fact, I think that leadership often begins only where forgiveness begins.



I’ve lost too many people in ways that I cannot control to not tell anyone who will listen that if you can save a relationship, business or personal, simply by saying “I’m sorry” or hearing “I’m sorry” (and the latter is often harder than the former), do it.  The fact is that most people reading this will have someone who is no longer in your life who you wish still was, and the only reason they’re not is you haven’t been able to say “I’m sorry”, or hear “I’m sorry”.

And guess what? That’s making you a less effective leader.  I’m not saying it’s making you an ineffective leader – but it is making you less than what you can be.

Forgiveness

The difficulty for me? I’m not good at forgiveness.  As I sat on that plane flying home, realizing that I could never be the leader I wanted to be without letting go of some of the things that have hurt me, I was rocked by the fact that I simply couldn’t do it.  There were certain people I wasn’t yet ready to forgive; certain feelings I couldn’t yet let go; even though I knew I had to.  That remains true to this day.

I’ve shared this idea in a number of places and have often been told that’s the problem: forgiveness isn’t something we can just “do” sometimes.  Recognizing its importance is one thing, acting to make it a reality is another.

The fact is this article isn’t to tell you that you need to let go of everything that’s ever hurt you, and everyone who has ever wronged you, right this moment.  However, what I think we need to do is recognize just how powerfully important it is to do it as soon as possible.

How important it is to ask ourselves each day, “am I ready to forgive?  Am I ready to make myself and my life better?”

Questions are Powerful

The answer may not be yes today, it may not be yes tomorrow, it may not be yes for a long, long time. 

However, I am convinced that recognizing the importance of the question is a crucial step in leadership.  I believe that the answer to a question asked every day will come faster than to a question asked every week, or month, or year.

Questions are powerful in leadership.  Even in the times they don’t bring us answers, they remind us of the importance of seeking them.

All rights belong to the author and his contribution to about leaders

http://www.aboutleaders.com/bid/173459/Forgiveness-and-Leadership

Mind the GAP

We were delighted to be part of  Maclean's 2013 Campus Series.   Below is a copy of the article.   We work 

with wonderful gappers and families.  It was so exciting to be able to share one of their stories through this
article.  Gap years continue to become a pathway after high school, as a break in post secondary or even after, as we see in this case.   We believe in gapping at any age or stage in life.   As far as we have come to know, we are the only gap year planning organization that combines coaching and EQ within a structured gap year.  We partner with many exceptional companies who support gap year experiences.   We look forward to continuing to serve gappers and their families in creating a year we hope you will not forget!

Mind the gap

By Rosemary Counter | February 13th, 2013 |

Gap years now happen before and after university

Mygapyear Cate M. India Nepal 2011.

University of Guelph undergrad Casey Panning, now 24, was sitting in a Southeast Asian geography class when it occurred to her that she might never see Asia. With vague plans to teach geography, and inspired by a friend who’d spent a semester in Singapore, Panning knew it was now or never.

The gap year—taking a year off school to work, travel or volunteer—has been a pre-university rite of passage in Europe, where it began in Britain in the ’60s and spread to other Commonwealth countries—including Canada. A Statistics Canada survey of about 8,500 high school graduates from 2000 to 2008 found that just 50 per cent had started college or university within the usual three months; 73 per cent had begun in a year’s time; and by 28 months after graduation, 81 per cent of students were attending a post-secondary school.

Some schools even encourage a break: York University’s Bridging the Gap program allows students to defer their acceptance; Harvard actually suggests it.

But while the gap year once fell definitively between high school and higher education, travelling the world at 17 or 18 just isn’t feasible for many people.

“First of all, my parents would have never let me,” says Panning, who finished a bacherlor’s in psychology before spending her gap year teaching English in Costa Rican slums and travelling with her boyfriend through Australia, Laos and Thailand. Besides parental objections and a lack of money (and fewer skills to land a job), more maturity makes a post-degree gap year easier and more rewarding than its post-high school equivalent. “It’s way better to get university done and then go,” Panning says.

Nobody tracks when or where college and university grads go after they receive diplomas or degrees, but Susan Griffith, a transplanted Canadian living in Cambridge, England, says the post-university or -college gap year is a trend that has emerged since she started publishing Taking a Gap Year in 1999. She says the later gap year is both practical—“you’ve already paid your tuition”—and situational. “It’s much more difficult to get a job right out of university these days.”

This is especially true for students who graduate from programs like English and philosophy; despite what they might have been told, a B.A. often isn’t enough. Instead of working at a menial job, travel—whether for work or volunteering or tourism—is a great way for students to beef up a resumé and set themselves apart from the competition.

“Gap years were once frowned upon by employers, as if kids would rather travel than focus on their careers,” says Katie Idle, director of Vancouver-based Study and Go Abroad, Canada’s largest travel fair. “But things are changing; the workplace is globalized. Now it’s a big asset if you’ve travelled, interacted with cultures and lived in a different country.”

Indeed, studies show gap years actually benefit students. The non-profit Canadian Council on Learning found students who took gap years—affectionately known as “gappers”—were eight per cent more likely to find employment upon return, possibly because of their extra work experience.

Conversely, a bad gap year can hurt your chances for success. “An unsuccessful gap year is when you get some terrible local job and never get around to doing anything,” says Griffith.

To avoid this, a slew of personalized gap-year planning companies are flooding the Canadian marketplace. Toronto-based My Gap Year, for example, offers “a unique combination of life coaching and travel,” says co-founder Julie Newton. Her current clients, about half of them doing a post-university gap year, have found themselves living in the Amazon jungle, working on a ranch in the Australian outback and hanging out with Tibetan monks.

“We start the program with coaching,” says Newton. “We ask, ‘What do you want out of this year? What are your goals? What’s important to you?’ ”

If travel isn’t possible or of no interest, a stay-at-home gap year can be equally good for boosting a lacklustre portfolio. “We had one student who wanted to go to film school, so we got her into an online writing course, she volunteered at the Toronto International Film Festival and worked at a Cineplex movie theatre,” says Newton. The student was soon accepted into the program she wanted.

Most important, a gap year removes students from the conveyor belt of academia to get some much-needed perspective and appreciation for what they have. “People learn that they live very privileged lives and not to take simple things—water from a tap, even—for granted,” says Griffith. For most, another year of education may not seem so bad.

Which is exactly what Casey Panning did when she returned to Toronto. Thoroughly convinced she wanted to teach, she enrolled in teacher’s college and graduated last June. But teaching jobs are scarce. “I’m working at a law firm for the time being,” she says. And if nothing in her field pops up soon, would she tap out and go travelling again? “I would absolutely love to,” she says.

all rights belong to the author and Maclean's http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2013/02/13/mind-the-gap/

Funding A Gap Year - Little by Little

One of the questions we often get in the travel and gap year world is about money.   At mygapyear we specialize in working within individuals based on their budget.  Some of you future gappers out there might consider some tips from the image below.  While we don't support all of the ideas, here are a few to get you started.   Just remember, keep safe!

In Greek there is a saying:  Bean by bean you fill a sack.  It sounds better in greek, but the meaning is not lost in translation.   Every bit counts.