The Gap Year Legacy: 1991 Interim Gap Year Alum Encourages His Children To Consider One Too

Given our long history of gap year counseling work since 1980 with over 9,000 alumni, we are currently enjoying the gratifying experience of working with children of alumni.

Nick "Lex" Leeming is a 1991-92 Interim alum who explored a variety of interests and experiences through Interim for his gap year before attending Tufts University. He continued to weave in more experiences during subsequent summers such as working on a ranch, and assisting a Johns Hopkins professor on the island of Elba in Italy. He is now promoting the gap year option for his own children to consider.

The following is an excerpt from a 1998 Christian Science Monitor article featuring Nick's gap year and its effects:

Nick Leeming worked around the clock to earn good grades at a top prep school in New Hampshire. But while perusing more than 20 colleges during his senior year, he found himself oddly unexcited. He was "burned out" but didn't realize it, he says. His parents noticed, however. Susan and Ned Leeming did something many other parents consider anathema: They suggested he take time off. "We didn't want him living at home and working at MacDonald's," Mrs. Leeming says. "But we thought there might be something that would benefit him other than charging off to college." Nick himself was thunderstruck. He had already been accepted at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and was skeptical. "I had always just planned to go straight to college," he says. "I'm glad I didn't. My time off was definitely a turning point in my life." Figuring out what to do was the big question. He didn't want to sit on the beach. Finally, his hunt for something substantial led him to Cornelius Bull and the Center for Interim Programs in Cambridge, Mass. As a headmaster for 18 years, Dr. Bull says he saw kids marching off to college "without the foggiest notion what they were doing there." He began, for a fee, helping high school graduates figure out interesting things that could be done in exchange for room and board. Nick prowled through more than 3,000 different interim options in Bull's database of contacts and programs - from working with a musher in the Yukon, to farm work in northern Japan, to construction work in a sixth-century Syrian monastery. Finally, he decided to help build a two-story log cabin by hand in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and spend a month in New York working with a professional photographer in return for room and board. In mid-January, he went to Micronesia for three months, filling air tanks at a dive shop and assisting on dives. When he went to college, he was ready. He graduated magna cum laude from Tufts and was hired by a global investment-banking firm that appreciated his understanding of different cultures. "One of the main things I hung onto is my perception of the world," he says. "It's much more of a macro picture than when I studied at a tiny boarding school in New Hampshire. You realize there are other ways people live and that those are acceptable."