I had summer and part-time jobs all through high school and college, but working full time, renting an apartment, paying bills, interacting with people, not being on an academic schedule, all these things were very different from living at home or in a dorm, subsisting mostly off financial aid and parental help, and only having to earn enough to supplement my tuition money and have a little to spend.

Two years wasn't too much time away that I had any difficulty getting back into the swing of studying. Another year or more might've been. But I think that spending that time working in a related field helped with that. As I said, I already knew the language, where most of my first-year classmates had to rack their brains just to do the reading.