It’s the summer vacation! No more assignments, no more exams! Time to kick back and chill till October, right?
Well, whilst it’s definitely worth having a proper break and fully recharging your batteries, it’s also a good idea to try to stay focused on your studies during the long vacation.
That way you can start the next academic year feeling confident, on top of things and not like you’ve just forgotten everything you learnt last year.
This blog offers a few tips on how to stay on track over the break.
1. Plan ahead
- Plan ahead in advance to the next academic year. When the Semester 1 timetable is available, you can view, customise and export it through MyTimetable.
- Think about when and where you study best – what changes, if any, do you need to make to your study space and routine to make sure you’re working as efficiently as possible?
- Work through our Time management short course – this will help you to create a schedule to manage your workload.
2. Do some research
- Think about the topics that will be covered on your course next year and start doing some background research now. You'll find many articles and books on your topics in the Library and these are easy to download or read online.
3. Develop your study skills
- Think ahead about how you might do things differently next year. Take some time to reflect on the challenges of the past year and which study skills you would really like to refine. Check out our recommended self-access online resources on a range of topics.
- Review your notes from last year and think about different ways of organising them and how they could be used to structure your assignments. You could also consider alternative ways of taking notes from lectures or from your reading.
- Make sure you properly digest, understand and log the feedback you received on your recent assessments so that you know how to improve in future assignments. Refer to our quick self-access Engaging with feedback resource and glossary of the key feedback terms and how to act on them. You could also book a 1-1 writing tutorial over the summer to get some expert advice on your academic writing and tips on how to improve your grades.
4. Practise maths and statistics
- To stop your maths and statistics skills from getting rusty, why not revisit some of last year’s maths material? If you’re returning from a placement, you could go over the content you covered when you were last in Bath.
- You could take a short online course - again, the Library has good links to online courses for Excel, MATLAB, SPSS, R and Python. You can also check out our Zero to Hero course to refresh your knowledge of maths.
- You could also revisit past Moodle courses using the Moodle Archive (remember to connect with VPN if you're away from campus).
Wishing you a productive summer!
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