College Planning and Decision Making

This section offers advice on choosing the right college, financial planning for higher education, and making informed decisions about the college experience.

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The PG Year

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The PG Year
A PG or Post Graduate year offers time to mature and time to perfect a sport or other interests.

Many students find that a PG or Post Graduate year is a beautiful solution to several situations. Perhaps they feel that they are too young to go to college. As Kim Chorosiewski points out, a PG year offers time to grow and develop without taking a year off. Maybe they want to perfect a sport or artistic activity. A PG year offers a well-focussed period in which to accomplish that perfecting. A PG year also allows you to remediate small gaps in your high school transcript. Or maybe you want a year before you head off for five years of pre-med or bio-kinetic science. The PG year can suit a variety of purposes.

The PG Year is sometimes called a Gap Year or a year off. From my point of view, either description implicitly implies that a PG Year is a structured program of study, not simply a year off where you sit around and do absolutely nothing. Over one hundred private day and boarding schools offer PG Years. It will be worthwhile to explore a couple of programs to see if they fit your requirements.

There is a big push in high school to complete your academic studies with the best results possible to get into the college you want to attend after high school. A gap year gives you an extra year to develop a skill for which you didn't have much time while studying for SATs or doing your IB papers. That skill

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