Mid-Summer Application Planning Guide

Mid-Summer Application Planning Guide

Do you have a summer preparation plan for your Oxbridge or Cambridge application??

As we creep through the month of July, and most of us have either finished or are getting close to finishing school for the summer, it’s important to make sure that, alongside rest and recuperation, you’re on top of your application preparation. Part of this means ensuring that you’re hitting the right point in your prep, making sure that you’ve made some of the important decisions regarding subject, university, etc. and have the groundwork ready on which you can build your more detailed preparation throughout the rest of the summer and into the autumn.
Here, we’ve brought together our top tips on how to use this stage of your summer in the most effective way possible to ensure that you’re in a good position going forward.

We’ve split our advice into reading (thinking about your wider reading and how to have them ready for your personal statement and for discussion in interviews), admissions tests (focusing on how to prepare for aptitude and pre-interview tests you may have to take before interviews), and personal statement preparation.

Reading

Ideally, over the past month or so, you will have started thinking about reading around your chosen subject, perhaps selecting certain works which interest you or which are considered important to the academic field. If you’ve not yet got around to planning your reading, don’t panic! Why not head over to our collection of selected reading lists on our blog for some suggestions? You can also do far worse than to head to your chosen university’s subject website where there may well be a list of suggested readings published by admissions tutors – just remember that you do not need to read every book on this list, you only need to pick a selection of works which are of particular interest to you.

Now that you’ve got your initial readings in order (and remember to check second-hand book websites and online depositories if you’re struggling to access your chosen works for whatever reason) it’s time to get reading in earnest! At this mid-point of the summer, you can begin to build upon the initial readings you’ve conducted at the start of the summer to gain more in-depth knowledge of your topics of interest. If you have read any suggested works that particularly stood out to you as interesting, think about delving further into that author or topic to build your knowledge. A top tip here is to have some post-it-notes or pen and paper on hand so that you can mark or make note of the chapters or sections that particularly stand out to you so that you can refer back to them whilst writing your personal statement or preparing for interviews later down the line.