A12| Monday, December 7, 2020 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
pone college or interrupt their stud-
ies to work as proofreaders, long-
distance tutors, campaign
volunteers, researchers and Door-
Dash delivery people. Some are pur-
suing passions like drone piloting.
During Covid, the decision to
take a gap year or semester before
or during college is complicated.
With many school policies in flux,
tuition refunds or credits aren’t al-
ways a given and students who
have secured scholarships may be
hesitant to defer. At some schools,
students who take time off may risk
losing the chance to enroll when-
ever they like, and could have to re-
submit financial aidapplications
the following academic year. Find-
ing gap-year activities also is
harder now. Even part-time jobs
can be tough to land and the pan-
demic has suspended or limited
many traditional pursuits, like
travel or international volunteer
programs.
Jill Tipograph, co-founder ofEarly Stage Careers, a career
coaching service for college stu-
dents and young professionals,
says both high-school seniors who
postpone college and mid-college
students putting their education
on pause should commit to activi-
ties that develop their skills and
maturity. She suggests that they
map out their gap period and how
to structure their days. “You need
to have a plan,” Ms. Tipograph
says. “You can’t just take time off.”
Over the summer she heard
from many students scrambling
for alternatives as colleges’ re-
opening plans remained unclear
and traditional gap year programs
were on hold. Some students
pounced on travel and volunteer-
ing opportunities in places like Is-
rael, which had lower levels of
Covid at the time. Others chose to
take internships or part-time jobs,
while living with their parents or
in off-campus housing.
Many students who have putcollege on pause are hoping that a
vaccine will bring campuses back
to normal by the time they return.
More than 700 Princeton Univer-
sity students, including about 17%
of incoming freshmen, took defer-
rals or leaves of absence this year,
while more than 20% of Harvard
University’s incoming freshman
class chose to defer enrollment.
It’s a choice that many college stu-
dents have had to make this year:
Are online classes, without club
meetings, sports or hours chatting
in the dining hall worth a semes-
ter’s or year’s tuition? Some stu-
dents say their parents—often un-
enthusiastic about subsidizing a
listless semester of virtual
classes—have supported thebreaks from school at such an un-
certain time.
Will Dionne, who is 18 years old
and lives in Chappaqua, N.Y., de-
cided in July to postpone enrolling
at George Washington University.
The school held almost all under-
grad classes online during the fall
and will continue virtual ones in
the spring. After deciding to defer,
Mr. Dionne began looking for
work. He had volunteered with
Chappaqua’s ambulance corps dur-
ing high school and had earned his
emergency medical technician’s li-
cense over the summer in hopes of
volunteering with campus EMTs.
In October he was hired by an am-
bulance company in Yonkers, N.Y.,
where he works 35 to 50 hours a
week. “It feels like it’s very clearly
the right call,” said Mr. Dionne,
who initially deferred only a se-
mester but has now postponed the
whole year.
Some students have tried to
replicate the on-campus experi-
ence elsewhere. The NYU film and
drama students vetted places that
were near airports, had Covid test-
ing centers and a grocery store
and ended up renting a house in
Bridgewater Corners, Vt. From
September through November, the
group of 17 slept three to a bed-
room, had dinner together every
night and produced nearly two
dozen short films they plan to sub-
mit to festivals and add to their
portfolios. Some took the semester
off entirely or took fewer credits,
while others completed a full
course load online.W
hen New York Uni-
versity moved
many classes on-
line amid the pan-
demic, a group of
third-year film and
drama students at the school took
things into their own hands. Reluc-
tant to tackle a semester of what
they labeled “Zoom Shakespeare”
and “Zoom Treasure Island,” they
began researching where to live
and work together inexpensively.
“We wanted to create an environ-
ment where we [could] riff off
each other,” said Marina Fess, an
acting major.
The students organized a cre-
ative collective in Vermont with-
out oversight or advice from pro-
fessors or NYU, which isn’t
awarding academic credit for the
three-month stint.
Many students elsewhere also
took action, choosing either to post-BYKATHRYNDILLGap Years in the Covid Era
Rewards—and risks—greet students who defer school for other efforts
NYU students, left, worked on a
scene in their Vermont rental
house. Will Dionne, above, put off
freshman year to work as an EMT.safety reforms. “Break times have
been staggered to reduce the num-
ber of people in break rooms,” she
says. “Many spaces have been re-
configured so that employees can
sit at least 6 feet away from each
other and/or are separated by
thousands of plexiglass barriers
we have installed.”
The company also purchased
single-person desks to replace
some communal seating arrange-
ments.
The water cooler instinct to un-
load workday frustrations and
gossip in a group is deeply in-
grained, especially in what are
now very-high-stress workplaces.
Andrea Nunnally, an operating
room nurse in Bardstown, Ky.,
says the sudden clampdown on
lunch breaks at her hospital in Oc-
tober was disruptive.
“All of a sudden, months into
the pandemic, they took out most
of the chairs, so now only three
people can sit and have lunch 6
feet apart.” Breaks are now also
strictly timed to 30 minutes.
“It’s definitely made things a
bit more difficult,” she says, add-
ing that the moves make sense
given how hard her area has been
hit by Covid.
As the country braces for a
post-Thanksgiving surge, break-
room controls will likely have to
stick around for a while longer.
The best practices, says Ralph
Gonzales, chief innovation officer
for UCSF Health in San Francisco,
are the same as for any other in-
door space: masking as much as
possible, staying 6 feet apart, ven-
tilation, not crowding too many
people into a space. “But the next
layer of mitigation, which may be
less obvious, is that we’re really
encouraging people to speak up,”
he says. “It’s OK to ask somebody
DAVID RYDER/GETTY IMAGES to put their mask on.”
L
unch breaks have become a
drag for Jason Alfonso.
Due to the pandemic, the
steel mill where he works in Pitts-
burg, Calif., has reduced the ca-
pacity of break rooms from six to
two people, mandated wearing
masks at all times and encouraged
employees to spray down tables
with a bleach mixture after they
eat. Not the most relaxed place to
take a break after spending hours
in an indoor warehouse.
“Usually there’s only one per-
son in there at a time. If there is
someone else, we don’t sit to-
gether, definitely 6 feet apart. To
me it’s the same as eating by my-
self,” he says. Mr. Alfonso, who
has lost two family members to
Covid-19, understands why the
precautions are necessary.
At workplaces across the coun-
try, break rooms have been linked
to the spread of Covid-19. They’re
often small, indoor spaces where
people let their guard down to so-
cialize. Even those most careful
about masks must remove them to
scarf down lunch. That leaves
workers vulnerable to a disease
that’s primarily spread through
close, person-to-person contact.
At the Mayo Clinic in Roches-AT WORK
KRITHIKA
VARAGURThe Rise of
The New,
Drearier
Break Room
ter, Minn., over 900 staff members
were infected with the coronavirus
in November, says Laura Breeher,
an occupational medicine special-
ist there who helps track the
spread of the coronavirus among
its staff and patients.
Once Mayo’s contact tracers
started looking into the high num-
ber of infections, they found work-
related exposures mostly happen-
inginbreak
rooms and
lunchrooms.
(Community
spread outside
the hospital also
played a role.)
At the Holy-
oke Medical
Center in Holy-
oke, Mass., a
cluster of 15
employees, in-
cluding 10 who
worked in the
ER, came down
with Covid-19 in
mid-October,
spokeswoman
Rebecca
MacGregor says.
“We believe it
was traced back
to them eating
together in a
break room,”
she says. Raul
Pino, director of
the Florida De-
partment of Health in Orange
County, said in a press conference
this summer that the county’s
contact tracers had also traced the
spread of the virus in the Orlando
area to workplace break rooms.
It’s a dynamic that’s at once
blindingly obvious to people in
these workplaces and somewhat
hidden from the sight of millions
of still-remote employees.A Turkish study of nearly 200
health-care workers published in
the October issue of the American
Journal of Infection Control
showed that spending more than
15 minutes in a break room with a
hospital co-worker, unmasked, was
a statistically significant risk fac-
tor for transmitting Covid-19. So
was eating food at the same time
as someone else at a distance ofless than 1 meter, about 3.3 feet.
People tend to let down their
guard among like-minded col-
leagues, says Clay Dunagan, chief
clinical officer at BJC HealthCare
in St. Louis.
“When the staff are together in
a lunch room or break room,
there’s a tendency to feel like
you’re in a safe spot,” he says.
“You’re with colleagues whom youbelieve are taking precautions, too.
But just like the rest of the com-
munity, those people get sick
when they’re outside the hospi-
tal.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention now ad-
dresses break rooms directly in its
employer guidelines for office
buildings, last updated in October.
The CDC recommends that offices
physically sepa-
rate employees
in all areas of a
building, includ-
ing break
rooms, use tape
or decals on the
floor for social
distancing and
stagger shifts.
For some
workplaces, a
large Covid out-
break has
servedasa
wake-up call to
address break
room safety.
This spring,
the Smithfield
pork-processing
plant in Sioux
Falls, S.D., be-
came the site of
a massive out-
break that in-
fected nearly
1,300 workers
and killed four,
according to the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration.
OSHA fined Smithfield in Septem-
ber for failing to protect its em-
ployees. Smithfield says it is con-
testing the findings and calls them
“not accurate in many regards.”
Keira Lombardo, chief adminis-
trative officer of Smithfield, says
via email that break rooms have
been central to the company’sMany workplaces, including hospitals, have reduced the capacity of their
break rooms to reduce the potential transmission of Covid-19.FROM LEFT: LAINE PHILIPPS; WILL DIONNE
Tools for mapping out time off
from college:
nPrep with the pros:National
nonprofit the Gap Year Associa-
tion was founded in 2012 to en-
courage students to take time off
to gain perspective and life experi-
ence before committing to a ca-
reer path and taking on student
debt. Their website includes plan-
ning guides, a list of gap year pro-
grams and advice from alums.
nShare your skills:Companies
like Varsity Tutors hire college
students to provide academic tu-toring and preparation for stan-
dardized tests.
nTry a micro-internship:Educa-
tion company Parker Dewey of-
fers students the chance to gain
experience at different compa-
nies—and get paid—without the
full-semester commitment of an
internship.
nPitch in at a park:Volunteering
lets students learn about different
occupations and explore their tal-
ents, all while lending a hand. The
National Park Service offers a va-
riety of positions across the U.S.A MINDFUL GAP
PERSONAL JOURNAL. | CAREERS & LEADERSHIP
NY