#gap-year

#gap-year

The Miami Heat's first half of the 2025-26 NBA season has pretty much gone as expected. After a hot start to the year, in which Miami was 14-7 after 21 games, the Heat have regressed to the mean and are 21-20 at the midway point of the year. This very much has the feel of a "gap" year for the Heat, and even though they're in the playoff picture, there isn't much hope for this team making much noise in the Eastern Conference.

Delaying, dropping out of, or skipping college altogether have long been popular in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison have all done some version of it. As artificial intelligence hype draws young founders to San Francisco, programs at companies like Palantir Technologies are rolling out anti-college initiatives for high school graduates. Meanwhile, startup entrepreneurship programs like Y Combinator skew increasingly younger, as taking a gap year has become less contrarian and more mainstream for aspiring technocrats.

I went to Texas A&M University. It's a big school in a small-town bubble, where friendliness and tradition rule. I built a good life in Texas. I married a local boy, raised kids, built a career, and did everything the cultural syllabus told me to do. But deep down, I always felt a little out of place, like the transfer student who arrived halfway through the semester.