Balancing Work and Relaxation in Summer

Your Grades Still Come First

It's worth remembering that, despite the large amount of work that goes into a strong application, your school studies should never be neglected over the summer. Making an excellent, competitive application is all well and good, but if you don't get the right grades, predicted or real, you won't be getting onto the course of your choice in the first place. Any preparation you do this summer should sit alongside, not instead of, keeping on top of your academic work.

Working Non-Stop Isn't the Answer Either

At the same time, treating the summer as an unbroken stretch of application admin isn't a great plan either. Going back to school in September tired and frazzled isn't going to make for a strong start the new school year, and a personal statement or set of admissions test notes put together in a state of exhaustion rarely reflects your best thinking.

The most effective preparation tends to come from students who've paced themselves, not those who've crammed everything into a handful of frantic weeks.

Create a Loose Schedule

We recommend making a loose schedule for the summer, on a half-day, day, or weekly basis, to ensure you get time to touch on a bit of everything without any one thing taking over.

For example, in a given week you might want to portion each morning for two hours of school work, each afternoon for two hours of personal statement research, a whole day for super-curricular activities such as museum visits, film watching, or language exchange, and a day or two for personal and family time.

This isn't about being completely rigid. Taking a week or two away for a family or friends' holiday should absolutely remain a priority, and some weeks will naturally look busier than others. But having a loose sense of how much time you want to apportion to each part of your application, and each part of your life, will help you avoid a mad dash in the final week or so before September to get everything done.