What a Gap Year Actually Teaches You
Student Fellow Abigail Africa has spent the past year away from formal schooling, and she has some thoughts about what that time is really for. In a personal letter shared with Figma's community, she reflects on the experience of stepping off the traditional education treadmill — and what she learned when she got off it.
Africa says the decision to take a gap year felt like opting out of a system that measures progress in semesters and credits. But the pause, she argues, isn't about avoiding work. It's about redefining what counts as growth. She describes the year as a period of unstructured problem-solving, where the assignments were self-imposed and the deadlines were personal.
The Advice That Stuck
Africa's letter leans heavily on conversations with mentors — some of whom took their own unconventional paths through education. The common thread in their advice: school is a tool, not a verdict. Learning how to learn, they told her, matters more than any single syllabus. She echoes that sentiment in her own words, encouraging other students to treat their education as a portfolio of experiences rather than a checklist of requirements.
That framing is especially relevant for students in engineering and design programs, where the pressure to specialize early can crowd out exploration. Africa's mentors pushed her to think about the connective tissue between disciplines — the way a design principle shows up in code, or how a technical constraint shapes a creative brief.
Joining the Conversation
The letter is as much an invitation as it is a reflection. Africa asks other students — those just starting their gap year, those returning to campus, and those still weighing the decision — to share their own stories. Education, she suggests, is a collective project, not a solitary one. And the conversation about what it should look like is far from finished.
For Africa, the gap year wasn't a detour. It was the real route — just one that doesn't appear on any official map.
The math of taking a year off
When Abigail Africa first raised the idea of taking a gap year with her family, the response was immediate and unanimous. Her parents questioned whether she would ever return to school; her grandmother pulled her aside in the kitchen and told her plainly: “Just finish. You are almost done.”
Africa, a rising senior at USC and part of Figma’s inaugural Student Fellowship, was weighing whether to defer her final year in her major program—a year that was supposed to center on a senior capstone in which she would pitch, run, and grow a startup. Like many students this fall, she found herself trying to reconcile the vision she had built over three years with the reality of remote classes, closed makerspaces, and a campus stripped of the communal experiences she had been looking forward to.
Three reasons to wait
Her rationale for a gap year came down to three points. First, she wanted to be at school when she could invest her time fully—in classes, community, and extracurriculars. Second, working for a year would let her build savings so she wouldn’t have to seek a job during an uncertain period. Third, she saw value in extended startup experience if she eventually wanted to run her own company.
What she couldn’t articulate to her family, at least not that day, was the cultural dimension. To many of her peers, a gap year carries an aspirational sheen—a signal that someone is bold or exceptional enough to forge a path without finishing their degree. To her family, first-generation immigrants who had built their lives in the U.S. after leaving careers as a lawyer, shipping merchant, banker, and nurse, education was not an optional ladder but the only path to success, to be climbed with discipline and focus.
Her parents had invested heavily in her education. Africa arrived at USC on a full merit scholarship. “Time off does not compute,” she writes.
The dropout mythology problem
Tech’s narrative around leaving school early has long centered on a specific archetype: the Ivy League dropout, usually male, who takes a leap of faith and builds something big. Africa is a Filipino woman, and that story doesn’t look like her.
She spent the summer interning at Primer, a startup she cared about, which gave her some optimism that the archetype is opening up. “It suddenly seems possible that if I never went back to school at all, I could continue to get jobs that I’m meant for,” she writes. But she holds that view with a loose grip. “I’ve seen that time and time again, in talking to friends and looking up to heroes, meritocracy is often tangled up in so many concepts—representation, privilege, opportunity—that can weigh heavy on women who look like me.”
"Predicting who will succeed is an imperfect art. And parts of it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. When venture capitalists say—and they do say—“We think it’s young white men, ideally Ivy League dropouts, who are the safest bets,” and then only invest in young white men with Ivy League backgrounds, of course young white men with Ivy League backgrounds are the only ones who make money for them (they also are the only ones who lose money for them, but who’s keeping track of that?)." -Ellen Pao, from her book, Reset, on her time at Kleiner Perkins“"Predicting who will succeed is an imperfect art. And parts of it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. When venture capitalists say—and they do say—“We think it’s young white men, ideally Ivy League dropouts, who are the safest bets,” and then only invest in young white men with Ivy League backgrounds, of course young white men with Ivy League backgrounds are the only ones who make money for them (they also are the only ones who lose money for them, but who’s keeping track of that?)." -Ellen Pao, from her book, Reset, on her time at Kleiner Perkins”
Leaving school is a risk for anyone, but the calculus isn’t equal. “Without my scholarship and my job, I wouldn't be asking these questions at all,” Africa acknowledges. She can entertain a gap year because it’s financially feasible—a choice not every student, especially first-generation, Black, or Latinx students, gets to make.
What the advisors said
Seeking guidance, Africa turned to mentors with very different perspectives. Her current boss, Primer’s Ryan Delk, suggested a single, clarifying question: “Where are you going to grow more in a year?” Her previous boss, Camille Ricketts of Notion, pushed her to take risks early. “The stakes only get higher as the years go by,” Ricketts said. “Early on is the time to be an energetic and ambitious generalist.”
From there, Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field, who himself left college to start Figma, opened up conversations with a broader set of voices: Laura Deming, John Maeda, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Weiner, Karlie Kloss, and May-Li Khoe. The interviews are available online, and they converge on a few points. Everyone agreed that companies shouldn’t require college degrees. Andreessen said degrees don’t factor into his funding decisions. Weiner discussed how LinkedIn evolved its thinking on the subject. Deming called Ivy League degrees, for her purposes, an “anti-signal.”
Weiner’s broader advice echoed Ricketts: find the sweet spot between what you’re good at and what you love. “I'm good at what I do for work, and I love being at school,” Africa reflects. “Maybe it's not such a wild idea to take a year off to work so I can save that fourth year of learning for a better time.”
Kloss, who didn’t have the college experience while building her career, spoke of a nagging sense that something was missing. “The inverse seems true for me,” Africa says, “and I think that's okay. ‘Listen to yourself,’ she said. ‘You have the answer.’”
The ROI calculation that changed her mind
Still, Africa struggled with what to tell her parents. “The ideas I hold about personal growth or education, even when bolstered by these thoughtful and successful people, don’t factor into the investment my family has already made in my education,” she writes.
She was close to giving up and simply returning to school to avoid another debate, until she played back John Maeda’s interview and caught the phrase: “Calculate the ROI.”
So she did. Following the advice of Weiner, Andreessen, and Maeda, Africa wrote out the actual numbers—her expected earnings for the year off, what that income could cover, and how it factored against student loans, car payments, next year’s rent, and savings. She sent the calculations to her mother, then waited in silence.
Mom: If you defer…Please promise me you will finish. YOU MUST GET YOUR DEGREE. Me: I promise you I will graduate. Mom: Such a shame…you need it as a minority woman…of diminutive stature.“Mom: If you defer…Please promise me you will finish. YOU MUST GET YOUR DEGREE. Me: I promise you I will graduate. Mom: Such a shame…you need it as a minority woman…of diminutive stature. ”
Her mother replied, pointing out something that gave Africa a moment’s pause: she’s pretty short.
A letter for everyone in the same position
Africa has since officially withdrawn from all of her courses for the 2020–2021 academic year and plans to spend the year working. Her decision is personal, but this letter is broader. The questions—how to value a degree, what the real cost of a remote semester is, whether a gap year signals ambition or abandonment—are different for everyone. Not everyone has a job, an idea, or a safety net that makes taking time off possible.
For students who do end up navigating the same questions, Figma’s Virtual Campus Slack group has a channel called #back-2-school with ongoing conversation on these choices.
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