Carolina Alumni Review - September/October 2009

“so I was able to just come in and automatically get involved in organizations.”

Will McClean ’09 stayed in just one place for his gap year: He won a full $40,000 scholarship from the English Speaking Union to spend a year at a secondary school in Scotland.

“I wanted to do a gap year, but I thought it would be nice to have a little bit of structure that was academic,” says McClean, who is from Durham. “It made it a lot easier to adjust to Carolina and be more extroverted and make friends and jump into things with my feet grounded.”

The Morehead-Cain experience

In 2007, the year the Morehead-Cain Foundation received a $100 million donation from the Cain family, the foundation began funding up to $7,500 of a gap-year experience for incoming freshmen who were interested. It funded a portion of 15 gap years in 2007 and 2008, and in advance of the 2009-10 school year it funded up to $5,000 for a specific experience — a language program or a service project — within a scholar’s gap year. Five Morehead-Cain scholars took gap years this year.

“We began this as a three-year experiment to see, if [the gap year was] subsidized, would more students take us up on the offer,” Lovelace says. “We were relying on our anecdotal evidence that it was entirely beneficial, but we wanted to get more of a critical mass of students taking gap years so we could really determine whether or not there was any measurable impact on their trajectory as undergraduates.”

While that three-year experiment isn’t quite over, Lovelace says he’s convinced that the gap year is valuable, giving students time and perspective.

Will Clayton and Elizabeth McCain, both current sophomores from Raleigh, took gap years before the 2007-08 school year with the help of the Morehead-Cain gap-year grant, and both said the grant was a large part of why they decided to take a gap year. Joshua Ford, from New York, also received Morehead-Cain funding for his gap year.

“I was in awe that they were willing to help me to travel and do what I wanted for a year,” says Clayton, who interned with an architect in Raleigh, taught Eng-