What we can learn from Rory’s gap semester in ‘Gilmore Girls’

Rory Gilmore, the beloved (but flawed) protagonist of the hit TV show “Gilmore Girls,” is cherished for her time in high school as a stellar student. But when Rory goes to college at Yale, the show takes a turn. We now watch Rory’s life move from an adolescent lens to a more meaningful and impactful adult life where every decision counts. We aren’t following the life of teenager Rory anymore; we’re watching her adult life with new adult choices. The most important one being to take a gap semester. 

There is a common stigma around gap years, something that even “Gilmore Girls” fans are not immune to considering the excessive slander Rory received for taking time off. We can learn a lot from Rory. In fact, according to The Wall Street Journal, 90% of students who take a gap year return to school by the end of their time off, making Rory no different from the rest of us. 

From seasons one to three, Rory is a high schooler attending an elite private high school paid for by her wealthy grandparents, who her mother Lorelai has many issues with predating the start of the show. Rory is a star student who manages not only to graduate as valedictorian of her class but is also accepted into the holy trinity of Ivies: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. 

Rory’s time at Yale changes in the fifth season when she takes up a journalism internship at the Stamford Eagle Gazette. She works under Mitchum Huntzberger, the father of her fairly new boyfriend Logan Huntzberger, who happens to be the head of many newspaper companies. However, this all goes awry when Mitchum tells Rory after a meeting that it takes a lot of guts to make it as a journalist and that she “don’t got it” and that instead, she’d “make a great assistant.” He doesn’t think that she’s cut out to be a journalist (season 5 ep. 21, 32:10).

This crushes her. Throughout the show, Rory has only ever been praised and told that she will go far. For her to receive this piece of “advice” from someone who is so important in her dream field, throws her completely off. This is when Rory decides to steal a yacht with Logan and take time off from Yale: a decision that infuriates her mother.

Due to Rory no longer being focused on school and buddying up with her grandparents instead of agreeing with Lorelai as she usually does, the two do not speak to each other and their relationship is not rekindled until midway into the fifth season.

Now, countless fans of the show despise Rory during this period, several saying she is too spoiled and if they were in her position, they would never drop out of school. But while Rory did intend to drop out of Yale permanently, she ended up only taking a gap semester to clear her mind before coming back around.

I believe that fans of the show hate excessively on “drop-out Rory” due to an interaction that Rory has with her ex-boyfriend Jess Mariano while in the middle of her crisis. He yells at her after discovering that she is taking time off from school and asks her, “Why did you drop out of Yale?” (season 6 ep. 8, 32:40). For many fans of the show, this scene is remembered positively and is celebrated since it was the final push Rory needed to reconcile with her mother. But let’s look at it in a different light.

I don’t think we should view her ex-boyfriend as the right person to lecture her. It would make sense if it were someone like Luke, her mother’s fiancé, or Sookie, her mother’s best friend whom she grew up with. 

Even if Rory values his opinion, a random ex-boyfriend who’s flaky is never someone any of us would like to have shown up at a tense time in our lives to yell at us for taking time off. However, as problematic as that scene is, it does help Rory finally decide on something she was already close to deciding on, going back to school and making up with her mom. 

After this, all is well for Rory as she returns to school, like people tend to do after taking a gap year. She fixes her relationship with her mom and briefly sees a therapist as required by Yale after her time away. This goes to show that taking a gap year, or a gap semester in Rory’s case, is not as big of a deal as people make it. After returning to school, Rory manages to not only get back on track with her career but also graduates on time and with honors, which is never easy to do, especially in a top three Ivy League school. 

There’s nothing bad about taking a gap year, despite what people will have you believe. Taking one grants you the chance to take a step back and reevaluate your plans for the future and hopefully, like Rory, be able to come back with even more determination to finish your degree.