It can be difficult to describe to people exactly what Discover Year is.

I can deliver the standard pitch and say that it’s a gap year program that teaches life skills to students seeking direction. I can be more academic and say that it’s a scholarly program allowing us to explore different career paths and prepare us for a working environment.

What I usually end up telling people is that Discover Year is everything I should have learned in high school.

While my younger peers, still in high school, were learning fractions, I was learning how to listen when people spoke and read between the lines of their speech. While I might have been learning about ionic bonds, I was instead learning how to be kind and empathetic, providing coaching to people twice my age and total strangers. Instead of writing analytical essays, I learned how my brain works and what makes me genuinely happy.

High schools will send you on field trips to museums or theatres, but for Discover Year, I spent a month pretending I was in Middle Earth as I travelled solo in New Zealand. It’s remarkable to me how huge steps like that can have effects in our mundane, everyday routines. The most important thing I learned on that trip was how I like to make friends. (For the record, I just act really weird as soon as we meet, and if they stick around, then we’re friends. It’s a simple system.)

Inversely, it’s amazing how tiny actions can result in huge changes. A year of regular meetings, baby steps in demystifying professional life and removing its intimidating veneer, have resulted in me being able to view goals long-term and to tackle tasks as they come to me, rather than procrastinating or working solely in the short-term. My scope of life itself has been expanded while allowing me to live in the present.

High school may have made me smart, but I can say confidently that Discover Year made me wise.