While her peers were preparing to make the rushed transition from the academics of high school to the rigorous curriculum of college, freshman Lauren Godles knew it was time to do something different.
"I was in the [International Baccalaureate] program in high school … and it was just a very intense academic program. Everything was just so competitive at my high school surrounding college and classes," she said. "I just kind of felt really burnt out from high school and I really needed a break."
Rather than jumping right into college life, Godles decided to take a year off from school to do volunteer work in Israel.
"I wanted to take a year that wasn't so much about me. Clearly, the year did a lot for me, but I wanted to be volunteering and doing something," she said. "I kind of have this image that you come to college and it's all, ‘What classes am I taking and what activities am I doing?' And I just felt like it would be good to be able to take a year that was about helping people."
Godles joined the Young Judaea Year Course, a gap-year program that takes students to Israel and provides them with opportunities to volunteer in an array of different venues and situations. Students in the program spend a year volunteering, taking intensive Hebrew classes and getting to know the country. Godles spent the first part of her program working in Holon, near the city of Tel Aviv.
"The idea is that there are a few different sections, so you get to kind of do different stuff all over the country," she said. "Most kids work teaching English … but I actually ended up working on a farm, which was really cool."
Godles explained that though farm life in Holon was not necessarily easy, it was not stereotypical, grueling farm work.
"Basically, we had to wake up so much earlier than everyone else and go at like six and take a bus," she said. "Every day we would pick oranges and pomelos … and we would help weed and take care of the trees and put iron in the soil, and our bosses were really great. We would take breaks with them and they'd always make us tea."
Tel Aviv's beautiful weather certainly did not hurt Godles' morale. "It was nice to be able to be outside and it was warm — Tel Aviv is right on the beach, and it's very much south of [Boston]," she continued. "When we would get the day off, [or] after we came home from work if we didn't have Hebrew or whatever, [we] could take the bus for a 15-minute ride and be at the beach."
After the first volunteering section in Holon, Godles moved to the Judaean Youth Hostel in Jerusalem to spend the next few months studying. Although her credits did not transfer, the experience was her first introduction to college life.
"I was taking Israeli history, Zionist history, Hebrew and all these different classes," she said. "It was the winter, so there wasn't as much going on, but I was on a football team — they had a football league randomly with a bunch of Americans in the middle of Jerusalem, and that was fun."
She took advantage of the time to become well-acquainted with the city. "We took a lot of field trips to a lot of museums and learned a lot about the history of Jerusalem," she said. "There's lots to see."
After her stay in Jerusalem, Godles took an optional trip to Poland to visit Holocaust sites and absorb a new historical perspective. While the excursion was difficult, she valued it as one of the especially meaningful experiences she had abroad.
"We went to a bunch of different concentration camps, and it was pretty much the most depressing week I had there, but it was important," she said. "It was [an important] part of the year to be able to go to Poland and then come back to Israel and see how lucky we were."
From there, Godles and the other participants got to choose their final volunteer opportunity.
"People did all kinds of things; you could take care of sea turtles, you could work in an ambulance — a bunch of my friends wound up at a naval school … but I went to Arad [to work at the Ein Gedi nature reserve]."
Arad is a small southern town located about 25 miles east of Beersheva in the middle of the desert. Godles described this portion of the trip as her "most Israeli experience."
"[Arad] is literally an absorption city; it's like all immigrants, and it's really small. It's in the middle of the desert. You know in Aladdin when they show you those scenes and there are the rolling sand hills … it looks like that," she said. "I would go running and there would be camels in the way — and I had to move."
In Arad, the group worked as park rangers on the remote reserve, doing whatever odd jobs the other rangers instructed them to do.
"Sometimes we would pile boulders onto these long water pipes because the sun was so strong that if they weren't covered up, the water would evaporate … or we would clean up or we would help tourists or we would sweep the parking lot — basically anything they told us to do," she said. "We weren't around very many Americans, and it was cool because we were living in a small town … When you're in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, a lot of people speak English, but this was much more isolated."
After her experience in Israel, Godles returned to the U.S. and began her career as a Tufts undergraduate. She feels that the experiences abroad changed her perspective when she entered college after her gap-year.
"I think just having the experience of having lived in my own apartment and having to cook for myself every night … and also having lived in a place that isn't America [was valuable]," she said. "When I was living in that town [where] everyone was a brand-new immigrant, hardly anybody even spoke Hebrew, and everything was really cheap because people can't really afford anything more. I think it just definitely gives you a new lens on how there is life outside of America and things are different."
She continued, "Coming into college, I walked into my dorm room, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this room is huge!' because I lived in an apartment with a room half the size for three people. It definitely makes you appreciate what you have."
