By Evan Dorian
I’m Evan Dorian, a Belmont student who’s taking a gap year during the 2020-2021 school year. There’s nothing that hasn’t already been said about how “unprecedented” the events of this year have been, so I’ll save all of that and instead talk a little about the pros of taking a gap year during a pandemic.
I like to think that I’m relatively aware of the potential fallout of the coronavirus pandemic as it relates to my college experience, so when we were sent home from Belmont in March, I was pretty sure that would be the last time I’d be on campus for quite some time. And while many students were eagerly preparing to return to campus in the fall with everything “back to normal” I came to realize that that was an impossibility.
I truly respect the dedication of the thousands of Belmont students who returned to campus and have been playing their part in ensuring a safe experience for the others who did. But I instead elected to stay at home this semester, and almost assuredly the spring semester as well, for my own sake as well as the sake of my higher-risk parents.
While many students across the world have decided to stay home but enroll in a full slate of online classes, I couldn’t bring myself to give up a whole semester’s worth of my Belmont experience while I stay at home, or even to go to campus and subject myself to the risks associated with doing so. I valued the experiences of my first year at Belmont too much to miss out on the many aspects of the college experience that are not socially distant and are better without masks and risk of infection.
I’m privileged enough to be able to essentially put the rest of my Belmont experience on hold. I don’t feel like I’m abandoning Belmont by any means, but rather saving the rest of my time there for when the time is right. In the meantime, I do have some idea of how to make the most of my year off. I won’t be hiking through Europe or sampling Southeast Asian cuisine, but I will be making connections and developing skills that can help me regain my footing in the educational and professional world when I return to it.
I started a blog called “Mind the Gap” to chronicle my gap year, but it took a little bit of a different shape than I expected it to, and I think I’ll be changing it even more in the future. I was skeptical that Belmont students would be returning to campus at all, so I was operating on the expectation that it could serve as a means of helping the student body feel unified over social media while they were apart. I think it did for a time, but now that students are actually on campus, I think the blog would be better served by content that’s relevant to just me – I’m okay with giving myself the spotlight sometimes!
What I hope to do with my gap year is what may very well fill the blog – and while I’ve got two online classes to worry about, I have an idea of what I want my next big personal project to be. Any public relations major will tell you that networking is key, and I personally love networking. While I miss the in-person aspect of networking, it’s easy (sometimes surprisingly so) to get a hold of people with whom you want to connect. As a sports fan interested in public relations, social media management and communication in general, a dream job of mine would be to work in PR and/or social media for a professional sports team. The return of the NBA season and a desire to network inspired me to put together a comprehensive list of as many people I could find in the PR and social media departments of the 30 NBA teams so I can “cold call” them over the course of the next few months.
I dipped my toe into networking earlier in the summer when a friend and I reached out to some sports journalists and broadcasters, but I feel more confident now than ever before that PR is where I’m most comfortable and successful, so I’d like to embark on a networking project that supports my goal of becoming a better PR student.
It’ll be a difficult experience waiting out the next year before I hope to return to Belmont in person, vaccinated against COVID-19, but I’m hopeful about what I can accomplish in the interim.
Evan Dorian Belmont student who, you guessed it, is taking a gap year right now. He’s completed his freshman year and is taking a handful of credit hours over the next two semesters to maintain enrollment. Evan is a proud PR major, and one of the directors of Tower Creative Communications, Belmont’s student-run firm. He’s a fan of basketball, jigsaw puzzles and basketball jigsaw puzzles.