Nick Bruce "Get out there!"

Year 13 is a year in which a lot of huge decisions have to be made - which university to attend, whether to take a gap year, what you want to do after university (even though that seems a world away). After taking advice from friends, family and services provided by the school, I took a gap year and ended up doing temping work around London. In hindsight, I think half a year working and half a year travelling would have been more productive, however I was able to save up a bit of cash to put towards university. A lot of my friends went abroad - building hospitals in Nepal, trekking the Andes - and they had a great time. I found however that during my gap year, I learnt a lot about working life which I still find invaluable, and certainly the first few months "finding your feet" in the world of work let you know what kind of professional you are going to be, and in which environment you want to work (for example, I know that I will never again work at the headquarters of a certain industry-leading supermarket brand inputting the volume of catfood sales into a computer). 

That's not to say I wasn't able to get away. Trips around Europe and north Africa were funded by my gap-year work, and I was able to pay my parents some rent (much to their relief). The skills I accrued during my gap year - including those all-important "social skills" - are still as relevant to me now as they were when I was nineteen, albeit I can't get away with quite as much as I did then and use the "sorry, it's my first day" excuse. My advice is: after sixth form, get out there. Whether it's foreign shores or closer to home, the life skills you learn in that time before either attending university or entering the world of work are crucial, enabling you to grow as a person and work out what route you want to take to wherever it is you want to go.