Ex-'MythBusters' host Adam Savage says taking a gap year may be the right move for your career

Business Insider

28-04-2025

Adam Savage, the former "Mythbusters" host, says college is absolutely worth it — if you know what you're interested in learning.
But there's nothing wrong with a gap year to give you more clarity on what you want to do with your career, he said on his YouTube channel, Adam Savage's Tested.
Savage — a special-effects pro who starred in the hit Discovery Channel show "Mythbusters" alongside Jamie Hyneman for over a decade — said pursuing higher education depends entirely on the individual.
"We encounter school so early that it is just this monolith, right?" Savage said. "We encounter school as literal babies, and then toddlers, and then children, and then young adults. And then we go through the slog of junior high and high school, and we're supposed to go to college."
But we need to go to college, right?
Well, Savage suggests students should intentionally decide to attend college, not feel like it's an unbreakable rule. It's up to each student, he said.
"One of my sons took a gap year, and went and worked production in Los Angeles between graduating from high school and going to college," he said. "And that was a spectacular move for him. He got to live as an adult with a job that had to pay rent, he had a roommate — he got the full life experience at 18."
Savage said his son came back from LA with a "thousand-yard stare," having been "raked over the coals" during his work on a series of independent films. The life experience, though, was "great," Savage added.
"When you've had a little life under your belt, I think school means a fundamentally different thing than it does when you're just continuing the pipeline of going from child, to young adult, to adult, to school," he said.
Savage's wife, he added, also took a break before finishing college. She dropped out and entered the workforce, eventually returning to school with a renewed sense of clarity.
"She started watching her peers go on and graduate and move on, and she was working as a waitress, and she was like, 'Yeah, I want to get back into this. I think I'm losing time,'" he said. "And when she went back to school, she knew what she was going for."
Going to college straight away can still be a great decision, he said. People who know exactly what they're interested in dive into higher education with a unique tenacity, Savage added.
"Everybody I've ever met who went back to school knowing what they were going for — none of them ever got anything but an A in anything that they were doing," he said. "Because when you're interested in your subject, you're going to you're going to do really well at that."
Ultimately, regardless of the individual choices someone makes, Savage believes there might be a bit too much dependence on "certain kinds of experience," and not enough recognition of the "mental frames" that people can bring to their jobs.
"I have long said that there are people I have met, who don't make stuff for a living, who I would hire in a heartbeat to build stuff in this cave, on the clock for me," Savage said from his workshop. "Because I just know their skill. I can see it in them."