As others were packing their bags and preparing for their first days of orientation on College Hill, Ifadayo Engel-Halfkenny ’27 was flying to Atlanta. Instead of coming to Brown with the cohort of Brunonians he was accepted with, Engel-Halfkenny chose to defer his acceptance a year.
Brown allows most students who are admitted to request “to request a deferred enrollment” though it is not guaranteed that the request will be granted. Only students who were admitted through the early and regular decision rounds are allowed to request deferred enrollment, and they must do so by May 15 of the year they are accepted.
Engel-Halfkenny had wanted to take a gap year for a while.
“I was pretty positive about it,” he said. The pandemic reaffirmed that he “needed to spend more time in the world” before university, he told The Herald.
He started out in Atlanta, working for the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that aims to increase the civic engagement of groups that are historically marginalized in the state, including Black and rural Georgians. Here, he spent two months canvassing for the 2022 midterms.
Engel-Halfkenny said his two goals for the gap year were to improve his Spanish and “be outside.” He traveled to Costa Rica at the beginning of 2023 using money he had saved while working in high school. He also got a job as a hiking guide in Ecuador.
Engel-Halfkenny told The Herald that taking a gap year was “one of the best decisions” he has made.
Students who take a gap year also have the option to apply to Brown during their time off rather than defer a previous acceptance. Brown’s website states that students may only ask permission to delay their enrollment for one year but does not give guidance if students seek a longer-term deferral.
Annelie Delgado ’27 said taking a gap year improved her independence and responsibility. She finalized her deferral after she was admitted to Brown because she “wasn’t sure what she wanted to pursue” as a concentration.
During her gap year, she worked as an English language arts teaching assistant at an all-girls middle school in Connecticut. Then she went to Lisbon where she began to learn Portuguese.
It “was really nice to have a break” from traditional school, Delgado said. But when her gap year was complete, she found herself “ready to get going and be in classes again.”
She did not feel too much older than her peers at first-year orientation in 2023. There is “less of a divide among ages” in college as compared to high school, she explained. Even so, Delgado quickly connected with other students who had taken a gap year.
Romilly Thomson ’27 also graduated from high school in 2022. She also applied to Brown during her senior year of high school and deferred her admission upon acceptance.
“I just really wanted to broaden my worldview,” Thomson said. The year following high school graduation was “a really good time to do that.”
During her gap year, Thomson lived in Jordan for four months and spent three months in Nepal.
Thomson began to second-guess this decision when her high school classmates were preparing to go off to college. She said she was nervous about the gap year, especially as her friends were learning who their roommates were and picking their classes.
But she eventually realized that she was in “no rush” to get to college.
“One year is not that much time,” she recalls thinking. When asked, Thomson said she “definitely would” take a gap year again.
Although Thomson expressed some uncertainty about entering Brown a year older than most of her peers, she soon realized that a year was not enough to make a difference. There are other students entering Brown from “a lot of different backgrounds,” she told The Herald.
Thomson added that gap year students are “definitely not alone.”
Teddy Fisher is a senior staff writer who studies International and Public Affairs and is passionate about law, national security and sports. He enjoys playing basketball, running and reading in his free time.
