Before I started my master’s I took a gap year, and after six months working as an intern at a food company, I wanted to do something significant that I would remember for the rest of my life.
So in March 2023, I set off with two of my fellow Master in Marketing students to cycle more than 800 miles across Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Philippines with the French NGO Enfants du Mékong (Children of the Mekong). This NGO, founded in 1958, helps to educate some of the poorest children in Southeast Asia.
My two friends, Alice, Adélaïde and I all knew we wanted a project that both helped people and gave us a physical sporting challenge. Here's how it went:
Our gap year challenge
The three of us lived together for 17 weeks, or 120 days in total and we cycled 1,356 km. The project allowed us to meet the communities helped by the NGO while on our route. We visited different schools supported by Enfants du Mékong and participated in activities like cooking and sporting events with the children. We weren’t very sporty so this was a real challenge for us!
We raised around around 18,000 euros in sponsorship heading off. What we didn’t spend—around 3,000 euros, we gave back to the charity.
We could never have imagined such a rich trip, in terms of the beauty of the landscapes, the different cultures and the encounters we made along the way, with locals and other international travellers. If there's one thing we learned, it's their sense of welcome and openness to others. Every evening, we knocked on the door of someone in the village where we had stopped. Not once were we rejected.
Despite our physical, linguistic, and cultural differences, the locals welcomed us into their homes, made us dinner and often called the whole village to come and meet us. It was magical. We were in Cambodia looking for a place to sleep and the lady who welcomed us offered us coconuts, which she went to find at the top of the coconut tree in her garden.
I tried to cut up the coconut and then the inevitable happened. The machete was too heavy for me and I wasn't used to it, so I cut my finger. All 80 villagers then gathered in the garden and they immediately took care of me. They were all very attentive and my finger healed in one week. It was luckily only a very small cut so we could carry on with our route.
But it would be a lie to tell you that we never got tired of the cycling. Of course, covering dozens of kilometers in the heat, on sometimes impassable roads and with a few physical aches and pains sometimes demoralized us, but we never regretted embarking on this crazy project.
How a gap year helped us succeed in our master's studies
The project taught us an enormous amount about ourselves, our friendship, others and our approach to our studies. It's inevitably a project that will stay with us for the rest of our lives. Alice has since joined the Paris Olympics 2024 Organising Committee, and Adélaïde has also found a permanent job, while I went back to my master’s apprenticeship studies last September.
I developed a lot of different skills and certainly some of which I don't really realize even today. Working with others is essential for my studies at IÉSEG where we nearly always work in groups.
This experience made it much easier for me to cope with the work-study rhythm, a rhythm in which there's very little rest because there's always something to do. In Asia, there was always something to do: after cycling, finding a place to sleep and talking to our hosts, we couldn't sleep right away.
There was always the social network communication to manage, the next day's itinerary to prepare, and above all, preparing the children’s future visits with their contacts from Enfants du Mékong, who were on location and acted as intermediaries between us and the children. This trip really helped me improve my organisation and my ability to plan ahead.
Above all, I think that it helped me develop a skill that is becoming increasingly rare in our society where we only tend to speak from behind our phones. In Asia, we had no choice but to dare to knock on the doors of locals, dare to impose ourselves and we now have a mentality of: “Nothing tried, nothing gained”. And this is how doing a travel challenge like this has helped me.
The skills I now use in my Master in Marketing
Thanks to this project, I now have the confidence to speak in front of an assembly, I can participate in class with ease, I dare to say when I disagree without hiding behind a screen and this helps me on a daily basis.
I cannot recommend this enough for other students. You will come back with amazing memories and you will never forget the skills you learned while on the road. If you are a student and you are thinking about doing a challenge like this yourself, I would say “Go for it!”
By Victoire Hürstel, Master in Marketing student at IÉSEG School of Marketing
