Although common in other countries, many Americans hadn't heard of a "gap year" until Malia Obama made it famous when she opted to take a one-year hiatus between high school and college. Three competitive U.S. skaters—
Karen Chen,
Vincent Zhou, and
Gabriella Izzo—explain why this was the right decision for them as well.
"I felt it was necessary for me to take [two] gap years and focus on my skating, especially that year being an Olympic year," 2018 Olympian Chen says. "I didn't want school to be a distraction. I wanted to make the team and that was my mindset."
As a pre-med student majoring in human ecology, the Cornell freshman will have a heavy course load this fall in Ithaca, New York. Like many elite athletes, Chen has been homeschooled for much of her childhood. She has not step foot in a traditional classroom since the fifth grade, so she's looking forward to learning amongst peers again.
Chen hopes to find the balance between skating and school to stick it out for four straight years at the Big Red. "The connections and friends I make with classmates won't just take a semester. [I'd] leave and return to a completely different environment," she says. "I didn't want to go to college with other kids that are like four years younger than me, even though I look young. It'd just feel different."
Her Colorado Springs training mate Zhou is also enrolling in an Ivy this semester to keep his seat reserved. The 2019 World bronze medalist and two-time U.S. silver medalist is headed to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
"Brown was generous enough to offer me two gap years with an extra semester on top of that, so I only have to do this one semester and then I get to defer until after the 2022 Olympics," he elaborates. "[I've] been out of high school for two years and if I continue to wait until after 2022, then I'll have been out for five or six years and the top colleges are unlikely to find that attractive. My standardized test scores expire after this year."
The discipline necessary to excel in skating has taught them time management, goal-setting and superior work ethic, which they'll apply to their academics. Scheduling and course selection is already proving itself difficult for Zhou because he has to take five weeks off for competition. Chen's Grand Prix assignments—Skate America and NHK Trophy—luckily land on school breaks. However, her orientation is during Champs Camp and Autumn Classic International takes place while school is in session.
Similar to Yale student
Nathan Chen, now entering his sophomore year in New Haven, Connecticut, Chen and Zhou will FaceTime with their Colorado Springs-based coach, Tammy Gambill and she will make east coast trips to visit them. Chen plans to fly home as often as possible, but is also excited to be surrounded by her lucky color red at Cornell's on-campus arena. "I don't mind getting up at 5 a.m. to skate and then doing my classes," the dedicated athlete commits.
A short distance from Boston, Zhou will also spend some time training with Mark Mitchell and Peter Johannson of the Mitchell Johansson Method. Another one of their students, Izzo, has a seat on hold for her at Harvard University. She deferred her admission until next year to concentrate on skating, take a variety of courses to hone in on what she'd like to major in, volunteer at a local hospital and dedicate time to her term paper editing business. If her schedule allows next month, she does hope to participate in Jimmy Fund's annual An Evening with Champions ice show on the Harvard campus, which raises money for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Without juggling full-time school, Izzo has the luxury of spacing out her on-ice and off-ice training sessions throughout the day. The 2019 U.S. junior champion explains she's had to "fit in 48-hours-worth of stuff in 24 hours of your day."
These skaters are far from the first to pursue an Ivy League education. Paul Wylie, Dick Button and Emily Hughes attended Harvard, 2002 Olympic champion Sarah Hughes graduated from Yale, and Sasha Cohen went to Columbia University. However, this is the first time in U.S. Figure Skating history that four internationally competing athletes will be enrolled in four different Ivy League schools at the same time. Brown, Cornell, Harvard and Yale will surely put these athletes to the test, on and off the ice!
