A piece of me is missing. Many of you feel it too, I know. A ways back we were at a crossroads, remember? To our right, a steady stream of confident, respectable people flowed past, smiling and laughing at some inside joke. To our left, a tall man in a three-piece suit stood in the middle of the path, arms crossed, slowly shaking his head in disdain. So I went right, like so many of us did, and dodged the gap year guardsman.

I’ve often felt remorse for that fateful choice, splashing around in the vast ocean of undeclared majors and blurry futures. If only I had gone left, I chastise myself, perhaps I might have fully developed that bigger picture. Maybe then, I think, I’d see my path, clearly, covered in a soft, golden glow. But instead I came in blind, hoping that the institution would convert my confusion to direction.

So yes, a part of me is missing. I may always (for the next three years) wonder how my perspective might be different if I’d taken those 12 months to live in Senegal or whatever people do. But as I sit here in my dorm room, looking up requirements for various degrees on my laptop, I fear I’m succumbing to a dangerous way of thinking.

Gap years are magical things, particularly to those who opt out of them. Beforehand they seemed an easy way to be ostracized by your parents and abandoned by your peers. Looking back, they hold the allure of that girl you never talked to in high school. It’s in the past, but you often gaze off into space wistfully, wondering what might have been.

But then, after all of that magic and wistfulness, we all shrug and say “oh well,” as if we missed our one vacation chance from the fast-lane route of college to graduation to the promised land of a steady career. If that’s the case, I’m not sure I see the point of a gap year at all. It ceases to be a magical opportunity for self-discovery and becomes a simple delay of the inevitable.

I know I’m getting dangerously close to full-blown anti-establishment, hippy-dippy college jargon here. I get that. But if the virtue of a gap year is its offer of freeform exploration, I really don’t see why so many college kids who repent going straight into school simply resign themselves to the aforementioned launch pad of career preparedness. It’s like falling off a bike when you weren’t wearing a helmet, only to shrug and say “well, guess I’ll never wear a helmet now.”

There is nothing wrong with a firm education plan, or a stable job field, or grad school, or med school. If you want to be a business major, or study law, that’s awesome. There are many people who choose more rigid approaches because for them it’s the right move. And that’s fantastic.

But the problem is so many students, people who aren’t gung-ho for any of the previous options, struggle endlessly to find the one chute that will land them closes to wherever it is they want to be. Gap years are sexy because of their freedom, something many students give up when planning an academic path.

And maybe the problem is a culture that preaches productivity, or the assembly-line structure of higher education, but every time I hear the consoling words that “a major is not a career,” I pause. Because I think the gap year mentality should be applicable after you buy a new calendar. You could self-design a major, or take a semester to intern and try something out. Hell, you could take a gap year right now if it still really holds that allure. Don’t buy into a philosophy oof one-size-fits-most jut because you missed out on that gap year.

We attribute too much to plans, and not enough to figuring things out. Just because you’re enrolled doesn’t mean you’re linked in to a predestined future.