education vs. experience

I'm convinced one of the reasons a long international trip is such a rare event for 20-something Americans is the lack of time in the socially acceptable life calendar.

I'm not talking about a few weeks or even a summer in Europe during college. One of the quickly apparent facts when you're staying in hostels in New Zealand or Australia or Asia is the relatively large numbers of English, Australians, Kiwis, Germans, Irish, Dutch, etc., who pack up and travel for months or years somewhere in the post-high school or post-college years.

It's common enough to have slang descriptions. In New Zealand, pretty much everyone was expected to have an OE, or overseas experience. Sometimes it came right after high school, delaying college for a few years. Sometimes it came during or after college. It seemed just as often it came in place of college. The Kiwis could go to Australia and work at anytime or go to the UK once with a two-year work visa. For your career, the choice to go live andbar tend in London was as valid as the choice to go to University, as long as you weren't planning on a specialized career. Or it was a chance to figure out just what you wanted to do before getting to school and being forced to choose a career plan. In England, the same idea is referred to as a Gap Year.

In the States, there is no term for it. There isn't even a concept. You leave high school, you go to college or get a job. You leave college, you better have a job. That, at least, is the general assumption present in most of the conversations about the future when you're in high school or college. When Kirsten and I were thinking about leaving and going to New Zealand for a year, the general consensus from everyone we told was they were envious, but it wasn't something they would even consider.

It also wasn't easy when we returned. I don't know how much having a year off on the resume affected either of us, but it definitely leads to some uncertainty when
you return with no job and no immediate prospects.

In New Zealand, a college degree wasn't as necessary to get into the general business world as it is here. It wasn't always a requirement. Life experience could also work, or even no experience at all; it seemed sometimes places handed out jobs hoping the applicant would figure it out on the job. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's a concept hard to embrace with an American work background. Kind of like the standard three-week business vacation around Christmas. (I saw family-owned shops closed in early December, with signs in the door saying they were closed for the holidays and would re-open in mid-February.

It was one more aspect of a generally more relaxed society. New Zealand is nicely isolated from the go-go world of America and Europe businesses. The small population makes the country pretty much an afterthought for multi-national corporations, which probably contributes to the more relaxed business (and general) culture. Not
that I have a job at the moment to compare, but I'm not looking forward to getting back into the U.S. work mindset.