this is why you should do a hack club gap year.

this was going to be a message on my personal channel in slack, but it got a little too long, so i'm taking it here to organize it better: this is how doing a gap year changed my life.

1. amazing resources
2. super cool people
3. you get to really push yourself
4. independence 😱
5. also, it's just really, really fun.

there's also an extra note at the end — 6. why you should apply, even if you think you might not get it.

and if you're thinking taking a gap year, apply here!

one: hack club resources

thomas told this once when we were planning shiba, and it changed my outlook on hack club: where else are they going to pay you to make whatever you want, and then also give you a user base for free?

if you've ever made any personal project with the hopes of getting it out in the world and possibly making money off of it, that sentence sounds absolutely insane. this is the space that you get as a hack club gap year — everything you need to do whatever you want. now make something.

you get funds and resources, you get peers and mentors whom you can go to for help, you have dedicated time to build something that thousands of people will actually use and give you feedback for. you're surrounded by inspiration and awesome projects and incredible skill and talent. it's an experience that you will not be able to get from any other place, at any other time.

(and it's also for such a good cause: coding changed my life, i'm sure it changed yours — and now, we can change even more people's lives with what we do.)

two: the people

doing a gap year in hack club has had me meet some of the craziest people ever, and i feel so insanely lucky to be able to work with them — and this is only taking into account other hq members and gap years. every single person who is doing a gap year has absolutely insane stories and skills that you can't find anywhere else, stories that i can't even begin to dream of. it's extremely inspiring to be around such amazing people. i get my mind blown and there are just crazy things happening all the time.

do you know what it feels like to have your brain expanded 10x every day? that's a little bit of an exaggeration but just barely so... every day i see cool programs being launched and worked on, and i get to hear about people working on them, see how they plan and develop and the process of building something amazing. just this week — lapse and manifesto and hctg and morp and stasis and fallout are all so, so cool. and i can just watch them come together from the inside. and i can talk to the people and we can trade stories and learnings and experiments and build such incredible things.

and collaborations, too: this is an aspect that i wish i took more advantage of because i mostly worked alone, but i still learned plenty. this is what they talk about when they say you should contribute to open source projects to learn to code — i mean, i've never spent 5 hours designing a business card with someone else before, but i've also never made a business card that looked this good. i swapped silly css tricks with augie while building the ceiling site, and when renran helped with overglade, she took care of aspects of the event and did such a good job at staffing — i learnt so much about running hackathons and scheduling and taking into consideration things i've never ever thought of.

working with people above your skill level means that every day, you find 10x what you expect to find.

three: pushing yourself

in the process of running events and building connections, i have access to incredible opportunities and resources.

i get to do things like go to game developers conference which i have been literally dreaming about going to for the past 5 years or so. i get to travel to 928479135 different places and see how other cities and people work. i meet michael reeves and william osman and sondering emily whom i've been watching for quite some time.

i'm pushed out of my comfort zone to put myself out there to talk to people, to develop confidence and grow networking skills, to talk to strangers at hackathons and events. and of course — i get to meet incredible hack clubbers from all over the world, and make so, so many friends!

four: independence

the freedom of living alone and away from your parents! it's scary at first, of course, like many things are. there are many decisions to make. we have a house, we cook, we travel, we go anywhere we want, we learn and live our lives the way we want to.

a previous journal entry /sf covers this pretty well — you can't learn about living independently. you have to go through it to truly discover what you're capable of. the freedom is dizzying and almost breathtaking.

five: it's also just such a fun time!

as a teenager, imagine this:

you have the coolest friend group ever. think of all the coolest people you know, and they are all your friends, and not only are they all really nice people, super super fun to hang out with, all make crazy cool stuff, but also, you live next to each other.

so you can hang out every day!!! and when you go to work, it's with your friends! you make idle chit-chat over lunch, you lock in together, you show each other silly stuff as you work. on a whim, you take a trip to new york, to chicago, to the country store behind hq, and you all buy little axolotl palm pals. it snows, and for some of you, it's the first time you see snow, so of course, a snowball fight commences, and you all drink hot choclate around the sofa at night. you make cool shit together. you fly to places and stress at midnight about your program, but you power through and you run the program and you succeed and you celebrate and you cheer.

and it's all with the coolest and most awesome and most fun people you've ever met. it's lifelong friendships in a way you would have never experienced before. and all of those anecdotes are true.

six: why you should apply, even if you think you won't get it

it's very easy to see what i've written and what gap years have done and think: damn, i'm not cool like that, i don't know how to use kubernetes or draw or design or make a website or run a good event like they do.

but gap years aren't a group of people who are all good at everything — we each have our strengths and weaknesses. i think manitej said it best:

Also, no one in Hack Club is perfect. A lot of us gap years are varied in our technical skills, artistic prowess, ability to organize, etc. Some of us have been veteran coders or hardware hackers, others are relatively new. But we're all driven to make something we're proud of. There's no ask for incredible skill, just visible dedication to make something you're proud of. Don't feel like you cannot apply because you haven't done enough. Only apply because you think you can do more.

when i became a gap year, it was right after juice. i was terrified because juice was the first thing i'd ever organized in hack club, and i wasn't extraordinarily skilled at programming or organizing. what if i wasn't good enough to run successful programs? what if i plan something too big and fail?

but at the time, it felt deeply interesting, and i knew that if i gave up this chance, i would forever be wondering what happened if i took this path. and so i began the gap year — i was still scared, but i don't regret it a single bit. i think the best things usually start this way: if you're a little scared, it's exactly what you should be doing.

this is longer than i thought it would be, but you can tell how passionate i am about this :) i was not tasked to write this by hack club hq — i was just inspired by the manifesto site. it's a little rambly, though, so i might clean it up more in the future.

tl;dr: if you clicked into this webpage, chances are, the hack club gap year is for you.