Don't Waste Your Year 11 Summer!

So I've been asked this question by the current year 11 so much which is what to do during summer and also that they're bored and they want to do things like reading ahead in terms of A-levels, start studying straight away or doing all this. So I'm going to give you the few things that are actually genuinely extremely useful for your A-levels and for your futures that you can do during this summer that don't involve just pre-studying for your subjects themselves. The first thing I want to say is that resting is an absolutely completely fine way to use this summer because first of all you're probably feeling bored because you've just come from spending a couple of months studying every single day doing like 12-hour days including exams and stuff so your body is not used to resting. So if you're feeling like you're being lazy or unproductive that's just because there's a big change. But resting is genuinely important because of year 12 is extremely it's a lot more difficult right and when I say difficult I mean there's more stuff to do. So there's going to be things like super curriculars that you need to do for whatever degree or degree apprenticeship you want to do, there's going to be application stuff, there might be Duke of Edinburgh, there might be all of those other things. So resting is completely fine but what can you do in order to kind of boost your chances of succeeding in A-levels and succeeding in things like applications? Well the first thing that you can do is you really want to try and pinpoint a career slash degree slash industry that you want to go into first so that way you're more focused on what you need to do. Now I'm not saying you need to know exactly what university and what degree you need to do, I'm not saying you need to know exactly what company you need to work for but a general industry will help you decide what subjects to pick at A-level firstly. Do you have to take I don't know chemistry in order to do what you need to do or do you need to take maths for example? You can decide on these things and here's a few suggestions that I have. So day in the life of videos on YouTube are pretty interesting I quite I like watching them but you know day in the life of a quantitative finance, day in the life of engineering, day in the life of data science, day in the life of whatever can give you an idea of if you actually want to do that in the future. Then again the second part is something I mentioned before is what kind of industry do you want to work in? Now bear in mind this isn't set in stone so a lot of people I have a degree in physics, a lot of people that I went to school with they moved into various different industries, a lot of them went into finance, some of them went into data science and some of them went into computer science. So it's not super important to have an idea of an industry but if you do know exactly what you want to do the more specific you can be the easier time you'll have of applying to universities and getting a very specific degree. Maybe you don't need a degree in engineering, maybe you need something very very specific which is less competitive. You also want to decide on degree apprenticeship versus a degree which one are you going to look for? Degree apprenticeships are more competitive so are you willing to put in the extra work in order to get them or do you want to just go to university get a degree and work from there? The last thing is you're probably thinking or maybe this is close to results day but what subjects should you even take at A level? So if you are unable to kind of pinpoint an industry or something you want to pick subjects and think about subjects that you enjoy or are good at. Now just because you're good at subjects at GCSE doesn't mean you'll be good at A level but if you're good at something it generally means you have some kind of passion or interest in doing it. If you have a passion or interest in a subject it makes studying it at A level a lot easier because all A levels and I mean this for every single subject are in a lot of work. A lot. So if you kind of don't like a subject but you're picking it because you've got a good grade in it then you're going to find it harder. Whereas if you enjoyed improving in maths for example even if you didn't get the best grade in maths if you improved in maths a lot and you enjoyed the process of improving that might be a subject that you want to take at A level. Okay moving on from careers or degrees let's say you do have a decent idea here's something else that you can use which is online. There are free courses at MIT and Harvard that you can actually get certified for as well and these programs last five or six weeks and you have well over six weeks to do these. This is really good for two reasons. One is you can get a taste of what it will be like at university. So if you pick the undergraduate ones they are going to be a little challenging but you get an idea of what you will learn and how it applies to real life because a lot of these courses that you do at university are very specific to one industry. So let's say you want to go into engineering there are courses specifically on designing rockets. There are courses specifically on designing formula one cars. So a very very specific thing that you won't even learn at A level. Also if you do these courses if you get that certification imagine how good that would look on your university or degree apprenticeship application. You weren't just interested in year 12 in the break between year 11 and year 12 you got an actual credited course done at a top university in America in your spare time completely self-studied. It will look amazing on a CV and I'm going to quickly show you the websites so you can see and I'll put the links in the description of course so you can have a look. So bear with me for one second. Okay so here are the websites I was talking about so I'm again I'm going to put these in the description so you don't need to worry. I had mathematics selected of course but look at how much they have electrical engineering computer science and again all of these are completely free. So let's say you're thinking of I don't know data science why not right. You just open that and you can get the notes they have all the week stuff you get a review so an actual kind of exammy type thing which you can also download and you can actually get accreditation towards it. Amazing right but even if it wasn't credited you can talk about how you did this and you can talk about reference the professor's name so you know you did this course with professor Dufflo and you did all this stuff in your spare time. The things that you learnt and what you took from it is a really really powerful thing to put on a personal statement or a CV and again just look at all of these different things here. So I've seen someone do architecture select architecture there you go and they're all completely free and you can just do them. MIT is one of the top universities in America that people pay hundreds of thousands to go into whoops I spoke to economics as well and they just have all sorts of stuff and this is also a lot more specific so for example if I go even mechanical engineering medical devices and implants biomaterials statistics it's very very specific and a lot more tailored to what you might want to do and it will also give you an idea of what you want to go into in the future so for example topology is not something we study even at a level so if you have a look at this maybe you're in maybe it interests you and so you know what you want to do in the future and you can talk about that on a personal statement and they'll love that and they'll get you into those top universities and those top programs because if you show genuine passion and interest it will help you a lot and yeah so all of that's there and again the same thing for Harvard so the link will already have the free tag applied if you accidentally remove it you can just click on price and click on free and once again I don't know let's say artificial intelligence with python 10 30 hours per week seven weeks long self-paced and again you can get accreditation towards it but you don't even need that because this gives you stuff to talk about in those interviews in in those personal statements as well super super super super useful and it'll give you an idea and once again you can literally just search for subject area or you can select subject area I don't know let's say theology actually not health and medicine for example there you go so it doesn't matter what you're applying for there's something here for everyone which I really really like so that's another thing that you can do in your spare time in order to make use of your summer holidays the last thing you can do is actually have a look at potential a levels um once again I've got another resource I'm going to show you right now which is essentially all of the textbooks for a bunch of different subjects that you can have a look at now I want to point this out studying for a levels over summer is not that efficient because self-studying is very very difficult having someone explain something to you is a lot more viable the other problem is some people learn stuff over the summer and then for the first couple of months of a levels they're finding it really easy and so they don't build up the good study habits so that means when they get to let's say November December time suddenly they get to difficult stuff they haven't done before they don't know how to study so a levels start off somewhat easy because it's designed that way it's to get you into the good habits of reviewing regularly so I'm not saying to actually learn stuff but you can look through it and kind of see if it interests you so let me show you the resource that I have now so here's a resource that was um kind of shared with me and just look at all the geography um maths and further maths as well physics etc so again if you select any of these if you select chemistry for example it also has it for all three exam boards because don't forget at a level the exam boards are slightly different whereas GCSE they're all identical at a level they can actually cover slightly different content so just bear that in mind so it'd be good if you can try and find out what you know what exam board your school does in particular but again it has all of the textbooks and stuff you can just go on there you just have a look and see what it's going to be like which again could be a useful use of your time if you want to do further maths I'm going to explain this more in another video but there's optional modules as well so you can have a look at the optional modules to see what you want to pick the same is true for physics but only for AQA the rest of them you just have to do certain things but that could also be a decent use of your time it's not every subject of course but I think I mean the main ones are maths biology chemistry so it covers the the main things but that's something you could use in order to get a kind of vague idea but I want to really point this out is year 12 it's very easy to burn out so you want to make sure you are using your time to rest and do whatever you want to do even if you just want to bum about watching Netflix that's completely fine at least for a few weeks you probably don't want to do it for like months but it's completely okay but those are just a few things that you can do in order to have a slightly more productive summer but also something that is quite enjoyable I think some of this stuff is quite fun to do like kind of deciding what you want to do in the future