Unless you feel passionately that you should go straight into a graduate program, “taking time off”—and by that I mean working or traveling—has a lot of attractive benefits. You gain experience and, hopefully, confidence, and you can avoid sequestering yourself within the relative safety and privilege an academic environment provides.
As someone who went more or less from college into graduate school, I find I have a certain anxiety about entering the workforce that my friends who made different decisions do not seem to have. Although I’ve had several different jobs during and after college, I really don’t feel like I have been pursuing my career professionally outside of the university environment. I have been relying on stipends, scholarships and student loans for the last six years. That is a long time to plan a career, and it is a long time to wonder how the professional world will respond to me when I finally enter it.
I think that my friends who began working shortly after college have a financial leg-up on me as well. Many of them have good jobs with benefits, and are working on paying off the debts they accrued in college, or even adding to their savings. When you go straight from college into graduate school, especially if you don’t plan on working while earning your advanced degree (and sometimes you can’t), you stay in the very low income bracket of the student. This is not necessarily a problem, but if you do it for many years without taking “a break” to experience another way of living, it can become difficult to imagine having a “real life” in which you “make money” and maybe even “own a home.”
The decision you make for yourself will really depend on the opportunities offered to you, or the ones you take the initiative to seek out and apply for. If you are eager and can handle a lot of multitasking, one approach would be to apply to a few jobs, a few graduate schools, and maybe Americorps, or a program in which you can teach English in a foreign country. This way, you will have options when the summer after graduation rolls around. You may find that a company is happy to hire you based on your current credentials, or you may receive a full ride to graduate school, or perhaps your relatives abroad will invite you to come and live with them for a year.
