Ep 16: Planning a Gap Year Experience with Jason and Jane Sarouhan

Jason and Jane Sarouhan have decades of experience planning and leading gap year experiences, and they have turned their #gapyearstateofmind into a career that they love. The term “gap year” is often misunderstood and there’s no better team to set the record straight than Jason and Jane. Their passion and enthusiasm is contagious and if you are like me, you’ll be ready to start planning your own gap year before the end of the conversation. Whether your teen or young adult is questioning what to do right after high school or is thinking about taking a meaningful break during college, or if you are just plain curious about gap years, this is a conversation you’ll want to hear!

About Jason Sarouhan

Jason and Jane both had gap experiences while in college. They did not know each other then but both found themselves in experiential education opportunities. Jason’s story is a little tragic in a certain way. He was a really engaged high school student who was the first person in his family to go to college. He had no idea what to anticipate when he got there. He went to the University of California, San Diego. It was a really big school, tens of thousands of students. He immediately became a number in a large population of undergrads. For the first couple of years, he stayed really engaged in awesome social events and clubs. He played ultimate Frisbee. He was finding classes that were interesting. But by junior year, he was starting to get totally burnt out on academics that didn’t really seem like they had any real application for the real world. That combined with getting seriously injured playing ultimate Frisbee, derailed Jason’s focus. He called his parents at the end of the winter quarter that year and told them he was coming home. There was dead silence on the phone and they asked him why he was coming home. And he told them he just needed a break.

So he went home and got his old high school job back. He sat on the couch with his parents watching 60 minutes at night, building Star Wars models. He had no sense of where it was all headed. Every week. His parents would ask him when he was going back to school. He told them he didn’t know if he would ever go back to school. Thankfully, right before summer, his anthropology professor called him and invited him to go to Africa with him for the summer. This was the first time that Jason had ever been out of the country, except for on a cruise to Mexico when he was in middle school. He got a passport and jumped on a plane to Uganda, and started a six-month odyssey of tracking chimpanzees in the jungle in Uganda and getting a chance to go to Madagascar to an international primatologist conference where all of his academic heroes were presenting.

He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and then joined a three-month-long conservation and wildlife biology program in Tanzania, and during that program, he had a chance to learn conversational Swahili. He lived with an amazing home state family, studied wildlife throughout all of these amazing parks and also got to do a month-long study with a group of hunter-gatherers. So Jason’s gap year came out of necessity. He was really burnt out, but what it did was completely reenergize him towards learning. He went back to college and his grades were amazing. The trip inspired him to start leading trips with wilderness organizations and cultural immersion organizations. And that is where he met Jane.

About Jane Sarouhan

Jason and Jane joke a lot about how they had parallel lives for a solid 10 or 15 years before they ever met. Jane was also in college,. Jane was a junior at Boston University when she took her first gap year. Jane had come out of a really small boarding school during high school and was feeling incredibly stifled, claustrophobic and very discouraged academically. Socially, she was not feeling tremendous about what was ahead. So she chose the biggest school she could imagine in the heart of a big city and went off to Boston University (BU). On day one, her life started opening up again and she was having an extraordinary time. Jane was an anthropology major and found an extraordinary trip around the world. It wasn’t an accredited college program, but she traveled around the world with 18 students for nine months, studying global ecology. Where man meets the ecology. She went to England, India, Thailand, Malaysia, New Zealand and Columbia with a very small group of students. And in every country, they met tremendous faculty who guided their journey. Jane was working with people whose work she had read. They were her heroes. In India, her instructor was Vandana Shiva, who is a feminist and ecologist and a leader in India and in the ecology movement worldwide. She was Jane’s instructor. So she was just awestruck that this was the woman she was eating dinner with and riding on buses with and sharing blankets with on cold nights when they were sitting outside under the stars. They were people who cared for Jane. They were like parents. They were mentors. So Jane often tells people that from me, my journey is this work.

For those that say Jane loves to travel, she says that’s a wonderful starting point and of course, it’s true. But for her, it was the exposure to these tremendous human beings and intellectuals, and deeply evolved people who were so invested in her and her learning and growth. Jane emerged from that trip wanting to be that kind of person for other people. So her first real gap year was the year after that.

Jane came back from that trip, mind blown, and had one year left to go at BU. But at the end of the summer, Jane got a phone call from an old friend who was moving to California to start a nonprofit that was doing organic farming in San Francisco with homeless adults. It was the 1990s and she was a big-eyed, idealistic young, 20-year-old. Jane paused her academic treadmill after that trip around the world because she felt a hunger to be of service and of action. She wanted to take all the learning and see what it looked like to engage it in a different way. So her journey continued from there, and they did successfully start a nonprofit. They were involved in the really organic food movement in the early nineties in the Bay Area. They got connected to people like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, who was doing the edible schoolyard, and they were connected with all those projects. There was Catherine Sneed, who was doing organic farms at San Quentin. So people were using food and growing and the land as is sort of social growth and network and visibility.

Jane also went on to finish her degree at San Francisco State. Her grades were better than ever. She finished cum laude in anthropology and was really interested in contemporary applications of storytelling, of really making sure that contemporary social issues and environmental issues had a vehicle for accessibility and sharing on a larger scale. So Jane was exploring documentary filmmaking and all kinds of things. And then, in her mid-twenties, Jane got her to start leading trips, as Jason had mentioned in his own story, and started guiding high school age students on community service trips in the summertime all over the world. She started leading trips in Bali and Kenya and Thailand and just fell in love with the work. At the time she wasn’t really thinking how long it would last. But she is thrilled that the journey became her lifelong work.