When Margot Valentine finished her senior year at Champaign Central High School in 2009, her plans did not include going on to college that fall, even though she had been accepted at the University of Illinois.

Instead, she took a gap year in Belgium, where she studied, met new people, traveled all over Europe, and became fluent in French.

Likewise, her brother Andrew, who graduated from Central this spring, will leave for Peru at the end of this month to spend a year there before he enters college.

Gap years — that is, taking time off between high school and college — are becoming increasingly popular with students.

"It has become much more accepted, and at Uni it's embraced," said Bill Sutton, a history teacher at University Laboratory High School in Urbana, where it's not unusual for graduates to be 16 or 17 years old. "Nobody looks at you strangely if you decide to take a gap year. It's certainly one of the acceptable alternatives."

For Margot, her gap year was the fulfillment of a long-held desire to study abroad. She loved learning about a new culture and improving her French.

Many students who've taken gap years say the real lessons, though, are about themselves.

"I'm a completely different person than I was in high school. A lot of that has to do with my year in Germany," said Christian Peisker, a Centennial High graduate who was in Germany during the 2008-09 school year.

"Once you get away from the things that shaped you, you get to look at why you do some of the things you do," he said.

Christian found being suddenly popular — because he was the "cool American kid" — to be difficult. But he figured out who was hanging out with him because they were friends, and who was doing so because of the novelty of being with a foreigner.

He said his year abroad helped him relate to people better, make better choices academically and socially, and strengthened his moral compass.

"I know who I am," Christian said.

Mississippi learning

His older sister, Kate, had a much different gap-year experience. Kate didn't consider a gap year until halfway through her senior year at Uni, when she went on a service trip to Clarksdale, Miss., with Sutton. He takes about 18 students, mostly seniors, to Mississippi every February to spend a week volunteering for Habitat for Humanity.

After that experience, Kate decided to defer her enrollment at Harvard University and spend a gap year in Clarksdale, working for Habitat through the Americorps program.

It was a difficult year.

"I really struggled with the transition to living in Clarksdale, not to mention the work," Kate wrote via email from Poland, where she is spending this summer doing research and language training for her Ph.D. in East European history.

"Going from the structure of a high school environment (even the relatively flexible one of Uni!) to the complete freedom of working for Habitat was a difficult adjustment," she said. "The responsibility for running the Clarksdale affiliate rested almost entirely with me and a classmate of mine from Uni. This meant working with our partner families, overseeing the financial aspects of the organization, coordinating with our board of directors, managing volunteer groups, and making sure houses got built correctly and in a timely fashion, all with very little training for us."

This was amplified by the high standards she set for herself and the organization, she said.

"There are countless ways in which I grew because of my year in Clarksdale, but I believe learning how to manage my expectations for myself was one of the most important," Kate said.

Sutton has known more than 20 students who've spent a year working in Mississippi, including one of his sons. He believes the experience develops into a life of service for them.

"They get sense of real appreciation of the rest of the world, the world that's not the academic subculture. They get a tremendous sense of responsibility," Sutton said. "I'd be really hard-pressed to think of a single kid I know who went down to work in the Delta who hasn't benefited tremendously from that and hasn't used that to benefit other people."

One of the benefits, he added, is "they develop real, legitimate friendships outside normal cultural, class and race boundaries. They are pretty rigid in America, and they are really able to transcend a lot of that."

Life's lessons

Kate's plans for a gap year came as a surprise to her parents.

"I was impressed with her spirit of adventure, and I liked that it was an opportunity to serve, because we emphasized that in our family early on," said Lynn Peisker, Kate's and Christian's mother.

She was concerned about Kate's safety, and that there was a structure to what she'd be doing. Mostly, she wanted to know Kate had a plan for her year and for getting back on track for college the next year.

"There were moments when I thought, 'What have we done?'" Lynn said. "But as the year went on, we saw tremendous growth in her. By the time spring rolled around, she was confident, capable. She knew how to buy siding for a house. She knew how to negotiate with a board of directors. It was like being on a fast track to learning some of life's most important lessons. Did that come at a cost? Absolutely. It was difficult."

But, she added, it gave Kate an understanding of the complexities of life, including poverty, race relations and getting things done in the real world.

"It prepared her for a series of adventures. In a way, it made her fearless," Lynn said, noting Kate went on the travel extensively and has lived in Moscow and Ukraine. "Not to mention that she really did make a difference for some people in Clarksdale, Miss."

She liked that Christian's gap year, through the Rotary organization, was quite structured and supportive.

"It was a much more light-hearted experience than Kate had," Lynn said. "But he too came back very confident and independent."

Rising to the occasion

Brittany Scheid, a Uni graduate, had a more do-it-yourself kind of gap year. She has traveled extensively with her family, including international trips with her father, a UI professor of electrical and computer engineering.

"I knew I didn't want to just go to a country and visit," she said. "I wanted to really get immersed in the local culture and really engage with people there.

"I wanted to get out of my comfort zone. I kind of wanted some challenge. I wanted to do something I couldn't learn from a textbook," she continued.

She spent three months in the fall in India, with the family of one of her father's colleagues, who was on sabbatical in India. She learned to get around and negotiate daily life in the country.

"I was stunned at how life moved forward," Brittany said. "It's like the traffic there. All these cars are trying to get into one space. They're honking all the time, there are cows in the road, they're at perpendicular angles, but somehow, miraculously, they are able to get where they are going."

She returned home for the holidays, then spent another three months in Thailand, where she hoped to volunteer. A close friend had an aunt in Thailand, and the aunt arranged for Brittany to stay with a teacher in a rural area of the country. She thought she'd just be helping at her school, but she learned when she arrived that she'd be teaching English to elementary school children.

"I learned how I reacted when put in hot water," Brittany said. "I was really surprised at how I gamely rose to the occasion, and how I had a good time doing that."

The biggest drawback of her experience: She didn't spend much time with other people her age.

Outside the bubble

Leonard Schloer spent five months studying in China, through a State Department scholarship program for intensive language study, after graduating early from Urbana High School in January 2010. He learned Chinese and also adjusted to living with a host family and in a country with different habits and rules.

"I think I grew a lot just from experiencing such a starkly different culture around me," he said. And he wasn't ready to enter college after his time in China.

"I felt like there were a lot of things I could learn and experience. China opened my eyes to a lot of things," he said. "I felt at (college) I would be put back in that American bubble where people are the same and have only experienced what's around them."

Leonard's father is German and Leonard has German citizenship, so after he returned from China, he spent a year in Germany, working first at a university doing web design and then working in a research lab at a pharmaceutical company.

He's spending this summer working at Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts before attending Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., this fall.

"I had a lot of time to myself, a lot of time to think about things," Leonard said of his time in China and Germany. "I'm going into college with a pretty clear mind of what I want to do."

Trying to fit in

Adjusting to college life after a gap year has its own challenges, though.

After Margot returned from Belgium and started college, she found she had much different interests and priorities than many other freshmen.

"I didn't feel the need to do the whole college scene, get a fake ID and go out. None of that was important to me," she said.

"I had already lived away from home in another country. I went (to Belgium) not knowing anyone and I left knowing hundreds of people. I was in a very different place than all the other college freshmen."

Many of her college friends have ended up being other students who did a gap year.

Kate struggled at Harvard to find students who could relate to her experience in Clarksdale, even those who were committed to service and social-justice issues. Also, she said, "it was not easy to reorient myself to the abstract nature of many of my classes, after a year of very concrete tasks that provided visible results."

But the gap-year students say that — along with a new sense of confidence and independence, and fluency in another language — they've developed lifelong friendships and a humbleness from experiencing the generosity of strangers.

By learning about different cultures, people, food, art and architecture, you try on a new experience and see what it's like, Leonard said. He's more accepting, and more likely to strike up a conversation with someone new.

"When people are well-traveled, they have this aura to them ... where you feel they've seen things and done things and they have things to talk about," he said.

"It makes you a more interesting person."