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aking up late after having skipped yet another day's worth of class, I felt a sense of dread. I had grown familiar with it during my more than three years at Johns Hopkins. It was the impending doom of yet another dismal semester's grades, driving my grade point average ever downward. I needed to get out. I needed a break. What I needed was a semester off. I knew it was possible to do so, but still seemed so foreign that I had difficulty conceptualizing it.

I managed to drop my courses and make sure that I was withdrawn from the upcoming Spring 2006 semester. Six months later, I can now look back on the experience of my time off and understand the positive differences it made for me.

For one, I realized that taking time off from school is certainly not for everybody. In effect, it's much like graduating, minus the fanfare (and the college degree). It can be difficult, and not so much fun. I had to make a decision as to how I would spend my extra time, and the prospects seemed relatively grim. I felt it would be unfair to ask my family to try to foot the bill for travel overseas, and I wasn't sure that was even what I really wanted.

I eventually was able to procure a job at a local tutoring company, reading the resumes of college grads and graduate students. Meanwhile, my roommate and many of my friends were busy continuing their own lives. Graduation loomed on the horizon, foretelling applications to jobs and schools, students moving out and starting life after Hopkins. And there I was, working part-time in Baltimore simply because I had the apartment and needed something to do. The effect was sobering, to say the least.

Frankly, this was exactly what I needed. Taking time off to work allowed me to step back from the consistent and overbearing demands placed on us Hopkins students. I could re-examine what I wanted and how I wanted to get it. Ironically, a friend and fellow student who had been tutoring me when I was a sophomore had recommended just that course of action. It had set him back on track, he explained. I shrugged it off, believing it unnecessary. How wrong I was. We are conditioned to expect great things from ourselves over a long, consistent period of time. Hopkins students are bright, and this intelligence puts pressure on us sometimes as early as grade school. Elementary school, high school, college: the assembly line just keeps rolling. For some like myself, the opportunity to escape from that process, however momentarily, offers a perspective that is nearly impossible to understand while trapped within the system itself.

As I said above, taking time off is not for everybody. But for those who are struggling during their time here at Hopkins, the answer may not lie in continuing to trudge forward. It may not be that the school environment itself is the wrong one. These certainly could be the correct solutions. But alternatively, the course of view most beneficial might just be to step back and take a moment. Catch your breath, sit down and try to find out what you really want.

Jonathan Berke is a senior International Studies major from Los Angeles, California.

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