A year ago on May 1st, college acceptance day, unlike many of my high-school friends I had not committed to the path of college. While I wore the shirt branded by Otto the orange I would not be attending Syracuse University that fall instead, I would be boarding a plane to Israel and living there for the next nine months.

I was going on a program called Young Judaea Year Course. The experiences I encountered on my year abroad taught me more about myself and how I fit into the world than I would have ever imagined.

No matter how hard our parents try they can never really prepare us for to live on our own, especially in a foreign country.

Aside from the struggles of budgeting and getting along with roommates the hardest part of living on your own is finding your place and having a sense of purpose. After going to school for 13 years I knew nothing else, my sense of purpose was derived from studying and getting A’s on my finals so that I could eventually become successful.

In reality none of what I learned from my 13 years of studying prepared me for what I was to experience abroad, but that's how it supposed to be. You can never be prepared for everything you have to learn through failure.

As a society, we are so focused on numbers that we fail to see what is missing in our education; experiences. I found myself in many situations in which my friends' parents would ask me what I was doing in the fall and their response to me taking a gap year was “that's so interesting but I would never let my daughter take a year off”.

If you take anything from this article let it be that a gap year is not a year off.

I learned from the numerous amount of flights I missed and from the countless times, I found myself lost as my phone was on one percent.In fact, I learned more during the nine months of living in Israel than I did the past 8 months I have spent at Syracuse University.

As I frantically ran through the airport of Italy trying to make my flight, realizing we shouldn't have gone to brunch beforehand, I learned the importance of timing. I also learned the importance of listening. It is easier to judge a place or an issue based on word of mouth and close yourself off to other opinions.

Going to a small public high school in Westchester I was not usually exposed to people with different political or social views than my own. During my time in Israel, I was exposed to those with many different viewpoints and had to learn to understand their opinions rather than completely disregard them.

This does not mean I had to agree with them, but in order to truly understand an issue, you must understand both sides of the argument. This is a skill that I believe many students in college still struggle to master.

As cliche as it sounds my time living abroad shaped the way I view the world and how I see myself in it. I learned skills that not only prepared me for college but also prepared me for life. While some may view a gap year as a year off, in reality, it is a year on.

I learned real-life skills that I would never have learned at college. In fact, already having the experience of living without my parents allowed me to make the most of my freshman year and exhaust every resource given to me in order to succeed.

As I reminisce about my time abroad and my freshman year at Syracuse University, I am ever so thankful for the opportunities I was given to learn during my time abroad.

While unconventional, my year abroad taught me more about the world and how to fit into it than any college lecture has or ever will.