While working summer jobs to save money, I found an internship at Surfer magazine in Orange County and reported for duty in late August. I slept in my car the first two nights and rinsed off in the ocean before work until I found an affordable place to rent, and because the internship was unpaid, a job at a gluten-free store where I could work evenings.

As I quickly learned, a food store that defines itself by what it doesn’t have tends to attract a high-maintenance clientele. I took turns providing customers with my faux-expertise and stocking shelves, which I did with a recent college graduate who could not find employment that put his degree to good use and with a woman who claimed to hate the taste of water so much that she drank only juice.

This wasn’t the kind of job I wanted to hold for the rest of my working days. Showing up at the store after a day at Surfer, where the editors had some level of engagement with the tasks at hand, prompted career reflection like never before. It was refreshing, after a school year filled with so much apathy, to meet people who seemed to actually care about their work.

At the same time, entering the work force made the burden of assuming debt — and my own privileged ability to attend college free of loans — visible in ways that continuing on in school would have never allowed. I came to realize what it meant to take a college education for granted.

Aside from opportunities for unpaid internships, I found few low-cost options for learning experiences during my gap year. According to the nonprofit American Gap Association, about 1 percent of students in the United States take gap years. By contrast, in Australia and certain European countries, gap years are encouraged as part of the educational process; 17 percent of students in the United Kingdom participate in a gap year, according to one study by its department of education.

More colleges in the United States are encouraging applicants to consider a “bridge” year before enrolling, and many independent programs and some campuses — like Florida State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Princeton and Tufts — even offer fellowships and financial aid.

Ethan Knight, the executive director at the American Gap Association, still sees the need for greater support to encourage a more diverse set of students to participate. “You can get access to Pell funding to go to beauty school,” he said. “There’s certainly as much learning to be had in a gap year as there is in beauty school. So why shouldn’t students be able to earn access to Pell and other government grants for certain gap year experiences?”