Summer studying – should you bother?

OK, we accept that the last thing most of you want to think about as you finish for the summer is doing more studying…you deserve a break after all.

We recognise that some of you will be studying anyway – due to resits, masters deadlines, doctoral work or 3-trimester academic years. Some of you will also be spending the summer working, which is great experience and will develop employability skills for the future.

But many of you will waste a lot of time this summer doing very little. Be honest, you know who you are! If that is the case then YES you should bother! It doesn’t have to be crazy amounts – just something to stop you forgetting important stuff and give you a slight head start moving into the new academic year. Here are our 5 top tips to make sure you hit next semester running…

Declutter your notes
Map your modules
Read ahead
Up-skill
Take control of something

1. Declutter your notes

If you have left Hull for the summer, you probably just bunged your notes into a box which is still sitting in a corner of your bedroom or the garage. If you are a local student then your notes are probably still in disarray somewhere in your home. The summer is a great time to buy some smart folders and organise everything ready for the new year. Discard the rubbish and keep anything that may be of use in future work.

If you use a computer for your notes, you could probably do with a bit of file housework on there too! Organise you files into suitable folders, combine smaller files into larger documents, delete files you no longer need and give your hard drive a summer clean with the disk clean up tools.

2. Map your modules

Some of your previous modules will relate to modules you are taking next year. Look at the module specs and map the relationships between them. This will help you decide which notes are the most important to look over again before each semester starts. There is nothing worse than knowing you have already covered something that would make you understand new information more easily…but you have forgotten it all.

3. Read ahead

If you are taking a module next year that ran last year too then you could see if last year’s reading list is available at http://readinglists.hull.ac.uk. Just type the module code or a keyword from the module title into the box to look for the list you need. If you aren’t in Hull then you should look to read at least one of the online items – if you are still in Hull you may get better access to the books over the summer that are in high demand at other times of the year.

4. Upskill

If you never have the time to increase your IT skills during semester time due to other pressures then take the opportunity of this less pressurised time to get your skills up-to-date. At the very least, we would expect students to be competent in:

Word processing (all you need for dissertations and theses)
EndNote or RefWorks (bibliographic software to take the pain out of referencing)

Use the links above to go to our own pages which have step-by-step help and videos. We also have more support on other packages here: Academic Software Support.

Alternatively, why don’t you teach yourself to touch-type and save lots of time when writing up your assignments. Just Google “Learn to touch-type” and you will find lots of free online courses. You could do it in two weeks with just half an hour a day!

5. Take control of something

The summer is a great time to read some self-help books and learn new approaches. If you have a Kindle or the Kindle app, these books are all under £5 or even free!!: