When Luca Gwathmey ’28 first stepped foot on campus last year, 12 of the 18 members of his Bruno Leader group happened to be fellow gap-year students.
“Off the bat, we had a shared maturity and life experience but in very different ways,” Gwathmey said. “We took gap years, yes, but everyone did extremely different things.”
After being hired as a Bruno leader position for summer 2025, he realized that an orientation track that connected gap students was exactly what the New Student Orientation program needed.
The result was a newly established gap year student track, an opt-in Bruno Group that is made up of “first-year students who are starting college after one to five gap year(s) and have an interest in being in a group with peers who share similar experiences,” according to the program’s page.
This year, the track welcomed a group of 15 students, according to Gwathmey.
Inspired by his own gap-year experiences and those of his orientation group, Gwathmey aimed to create a supportive community for students transitioning back to academic life.
“Luca reached out to me over the summer and wanted to see if we could create an official gap-student track, so we were like, ‘Let’s see if we can make it happen,’” said Kris Lee ’26, a Bruno Fellow leading orientation programming.
Akshat Mehta ’27, another Bruno Fellow involved in creating the gap-student track, said the program aims to create “a pretty organic environment.”
Raen Kao ’29, who participated in the gap-student track, said they chose the track because they wanted to hear “some interesting stories” from fellow gap students. Despite sharing the experience of a gap year, they noticed their perspectives were “incredibly different.”
“I was an American high school student who wanted to take an extra year to develop personally and culturally, which is shared with other students as well,” Kao said. “But there are also a lot of international students who have more logistical reasons for choosing to take a gap year.”
The gap-student track is the latest in a number of changes to orientation aimed to promote shared experiences. In summer 2024, the rural student track was formed, and this year saw the introduction of affinity mixer lunches led by different resource centers and clubs at Brown, according to Lee and Mehta.
“We wanted to create space for more identity-oriented affinity groups,” Lee said. “With our specific tracks, it was more focused on shared experiences.”
Amber Marcus-Blank is a senior staff writer covering undergraduate student life. She is a sophomore from outside of Boston studying Political Science and Public Health on the pre-law track. She is interested in working in politics and journalism in the future and enjoys playing soccer and making playlists in her free time.
