Rachael's Answer to "Why Vanguard"

A Vanguard Gap Year Story

By HoneyRock Center for Leadership Development

November 17^th, 2021

All throughout high school I struggled with the question of what I wanted to do with my future. Each year I would get closer to college, but felt further from a decision that I felt so pressured to make. It seemed as though all of my friends and classmates had decided what they were doing with their lives. They had already started applying for scholarships and internships, and growing their resumes for college in a way that I wasn’t able to do. In the beginning of my senior year, I made the decision to focus on applying to colleges, and left figuring out my major for some other time. I put my future on the back burner, purposely choosing to avoid the topic as much as I could.

All throughout high school I struggled with the question of what I wanted to do with my future.

Somewhere in the whirlwind of college applications, I managed to find HoneyRock in the chaos. It was late one Friday night, and my dad and I were tag-teaming on my application process; I would fill out the application, and he would fill out the FASFA. He saw a popup for the ‘Vanguard Gap Year Program’, and asked me if I would be interested in doing something like it. Without much thought, I simply answered, “sure, why not”, and kept on going with the rest of my college applications. I hadn’t known it then, but that little popup had a lot more meaning in my life than I ever thought it would.

A week or two after I had sent in my application to the Vanguard program, my dad brought it up again to me, asking if I had looked any further into it. Knowing the bare minimum about the program, I decided to do some research to see what it entailed. The more I gathered information, the more I felt drawn to HoneyRock. I had never considered a gap year to be an option for me; I had always seen it as postponing college for a year to work, and nothing more. Scrolling through the Vanguard website, I was in awe reading about everything the Vanguards were able to do in just one year.

I was in awe reading about everything the Vanguards were able to do in just one year.

The weeks slowly went by as I waited to hear any updates about my status in the program. Sometime in January I had an interview, which somehow made me even more excited about the possibility of being a Vanguard. I checked my email every day, hoping to get any news from HoneyRock that I could get. Months later, I finally got a box in the mail informing me that I was accepted into the program. I couldn’t contain my excitement that I was finally able to be in the program that I had been researching for months.

Fast forward to September, and my family and I were making the 22-hour road trip from Massachusetts to Wisconsin. After days of traveling across the country, months of waiting, and many emails and calls, once we finally drove past the big ‘HoneyRock’ sign, I knew it was all worth it. Vanguard was where I was supposed to be.