HAPPY HANGING LOOSE: Going on a break before joining work can be an enriching experience

This is the time of year when new college graduates prepare to start the next chapter. It’s a time for r?sum?s and interviews and deciding what to be for the rest of your life. Or, if you follow the advice and example of Colleen Kinder, it’s a time for deciding how to escape.

Kinder is the author of what is becoming a must-read on college campuses: Delaying the Real World: A Twenty Something’s Guide to Seeking Adventure (Running Press, 2005). Unlike the ever-growing number of books on how to find a job, hers (and her website: www.delayingtherealworld.com) is about how not to find one. You have plenty of time for all that, she says. First, take time to do what you want, not what’s expected.

The book had its start three years ago, when Kinder was a junior at Yale. She went on a blind date with a senior, and the getting-to-know-you conversation turned toward what the young man planned to do the following year. “I’m going to be a ski bum,” he said, telling her of his plan to give lessons in Vail. She did a double take. “That’s not what I thought seniors at Yale turned into when they graduated,” she said.

What Kinder planned to turn into was a writer, and it struck her that this might be something to write about. “I started asking around and I found a lot of people were taking a year to do something that had nothing to do with their planned career,” she says. She compiled their stories ? working on an English-language newspaper in Cambodia, planning helicopter tours in Alaska, going to Swaziland with the Peace Corps, being a nanny in Italy, biking across the United States ? and wrote half her book during her junior and senior years.

She wrote the other half in 2003, while working in a nursing home in Cuba, after receiving a fellowship and special permission from both the American and Cuban governments.

Kinder is upfront about her belief that stepping off the track for a year can also be a smart move. A r?sum? is inevitable, she says, and being able to include the year you spent building homes for the poor in India will certainly make yours stand out. “It's both a r?sum? enhancer and a life-changing experience,” she says.

“If you apply for a job on MonsterTrak, there are hundreds of other people applying for the same job and they all look exactly the same on paper. You want to look different,” she says.

Yet there is also a value to time off that has nothing to do with a r?sum?, she says. Her ski instructor friend, for instance, did not better humanity while in Vail, but while “You may not change the world being a ski bum, you’ve changed yourself”, Kinder says.

Kinder recently persuaded Running Press to sponsor a contest in which young people describe their plans for a year-long adventure.

She expected to hear from 100 or so applicants, but received 1,300 applications. Amanda van Scoyoc wants to teach art in the Russian orphanage where her two adopted sisters once lived. Colin Woolston hopes to spend a year in Borneo, rehabilitating orangutans. Erin Cox wants to drive across the country doing random acts of kindness, like buying groceries for strangers. Emily Scrubby wants to convert a 1985 school bus to an R.V., make it run on vegetable oil and head for Alaska.

The winner, Alexandra Katona, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, plans to work with indigenous artisans in Ecuador, finding ways to provide incomes for local peoples that do not require destroying the rain forest.

As for Kinder, she has spent the last year publicising her book and applying to graduate school. Next year, she will put her toe into the real world, studying writing at the University of Iowa and working on her second book, about her year in Cuba.

?NYTNS