Thorne Rintel spent her first year post-high school teaching students in South America and in Belize. She crawled out of bed while it was still dark, in order to write detailed lesson plans. She spent long hours in an overcrowded three-room schoolhouse in Costa Rica, teaching six grades of students without knowing any Spanish.

Rintel did it all before her freshman year at McDaniel.

"I had to really grow up fast," said Rintel over a bottle of lemon water at the pub. "And it was just what I needed."

The Maine native admits she didn't take her studies too seriously in high school and didn't feel she was mature enough for college when she was accepted to McDaniel's class of '08. On the encouragement of her mother, she decided to take a year out in order to become more "worldly," and to step out of her comfort zone. Way out.

The yearlong break before college, known as a "gap year," is already popular throughout Europe and especially in Britain, where, according to gapyear.com, 11 percent of high school graduates take one. Even Prince William took a year off in 2000 to spend time in Africa and travel the world.

A Princeton Review study found that very few American students take time off. McDaniel tends to get between one and five gap-year students each year, according to Admissions Officer Gina Rende. Rintel is the only gap-year student in the class of 2009. Two will begin their studies next fall, and three are enrolled as upperclassmen.

"They usually apply and then take the year off," Rende said.

While McDaniel students do many things with their year, she says they are not permitted to take college classes in order to ensure they are still truly college freshmen when they arrive on campus.

Rintel signed up for a three-month program with an international volunteer group called "Cross Cultural Solutions," and suggested they send her to Costa Rica. She lived in a house with 20 other volunteers who were serving throughout the community and taught kindergarten through sixth grade in a poor neighborhood.

It was an eye-opener. Her young students lived in tiny houses made from bits of wood and tin. They had no running water and no electricity, but Rintel says they always seemed content.

"They were so amazing. Everything they had, they made themselves. They used imagination to do things, and it made you appreciate the little things in life so much more."

One taste of teaching was not enough. After finishing her three-month tour, Rintel was offered a job at a private school on an island in Belize. She taught a first-grade class of 13 for the next eight months.

"I was thrown right into it. I had to do lesson plans. I was paying my own bills, doing my own shopping and I ended up loving it."

Now a freshman at McDaniel, Rintel said her time abroad has given her a new focus: becoming a school social worker. Rintel plans to major in Social Work and minor in Education. She pictures herself working abroad in some capacity after college.

"I feel like I have grown so much," she said. "I loved going and seeing other cultures. In a year off, I have never felt so good in my life."