Summer vacation.
It's a gap between your semesters,
it's a break from your classes,
and when you're a kid it's basically time
to make Pokémon a full time job.
To me it's more than that.
Summer is a time to complement everything you get
from your academics,
to complement your classes.
Without your full time schedule in your way of your courses,
you have time to do things
that help you gain experience
that will help you get closer to your goals.
Things that you can't do
while you're sitting in a classroom.
That's the idea we're going to explore today in this video.
I'm going to share six different ideas
that you can use to make your summer more productive.
This is an incredibly broad topic.
It's basically like asking,
"I've got three months free, what do I do with it?"
To narrow it down a little bit
I thought I would share just some of the lessons I learned
from my own college summers,
including one of the biggest mistakes
I ever made as a student
which cost me a ton of progress and time.
Before we get to that,
let's start first with fittingly my first summer
which I spent here at Iowa State University on campus.
The first tip here is going to pertain to you
if you don't really know exactly what you want to do
with your career yet.
That was me after my freshman year.
I knew I wanted to do something with computers
but I wasn't really sure what,
so instead I decided to pursue an opportunity on campus.
That's really what you can do to have a productive summer
if you're not really sure where you're going
with your career.
If you can find something that's challenging,
that's going to help you meet lots of new people,
that's going to help you learn new skills,
that's going to be really, really valuable
and it will almost definitely be worth your time.
In my case, I got a job on campus
which here they call Cyclone Aides
but I think at other schools they just call it
Student Orientation Assistant.
Basically I helped students sign up for classes,
I answered tons of questions from parents and students alike
and I gave lots of tours of this campus.
Which, by the way, did you know
that Iowa State University is one of only three campuses
in the nation to be given a distinguished honor
from the American Society of Landscape Architects?
I still remember that.
That job was actually really interesting
and I gained a lot of experience and skills
that I didn't think I would need
since I was going into IT.
I got public speaking experience,
I got organizational experience
through organizing an event and hiring a speaker,
and I met lots of people on campus
that I wouldn't have otherwise met.
It was an incredibly helpful experience.
A little bonus tip here.
Pay attention to these bulletin boards
you see around campus
because that is actually where I found out about that job.
Look, employment information,
grad student opportunities,
a lot of opportunities are going to be listed
on bulletin boards on campus
so do that and also follow your school's
social media accounts as well.
On the flip side from the first tip,
if you are a little bit further into your major
and you know what you're going to do in your career
or you at least have an idea of it,
then your best probable opportunity for the summer
is going to be looking for an internship
that's going to get you some technical experience
in your major area.
That's the best possible thing to do I think
because you can't get a feel for the kind of work
you're going to be doing in the future
just by sitting in classes.
You have to get hands on experience.
We came down to Des Moines, Iowa
because during my sophomore summer I ended up working
at an IT company in the networking department
and that's where I got a lot of the hands on
technical experience in my major area
and it's where I learned to manage computer networks.
That was really helpful because honestly my classes
didn't really prepare me for what the work would be like.
On that note I have a little bit of a third tip here.
This is less of an action of an opportunity
to pursue in the summer,
but it is something to be thinking about
and that is to be constantly gauging
how you are enjoying and how you are reacting to
the kind of work you're doing
because when you constantly evaluate how that's going,
how you react to it,
you're going to be able to make better decisions
on what to do in the future.
For instance, I liked computers,
I liked IT,
but I was maintaining computer networks
every single day for 40 hours a week.
What I discovered through that internship experience
that I couldn't discover in a classroom
is that I don't like maintaining things.
I like to build things from scratch
and I couldn't have learned that in a classroom.
That experience actually helped me to start shifting
into being a YouTuber, into being a blogger,
and I wouldn't have been able to do that otherwise.
Definitely look for internships.
There are lots of online resources you can use
to find internships,
but really the best way to do it
would be to go to your career center at your school
or your school's career website
and also book an appointment with your career counselor
to get your resume reviewed and discuss your career options.
You could also, if you're going to be on campus
during the summer,
book a mock interview.
These are one of the best things that I did
to improve my interviewing skills
(ding) during the year
and I also did a couple during the summers as well.
For a fourth tip here,
beyond the jobs and the internships
you can also look at taking summer classes.
Here's my thoughts on summer classes in general.
Like I said, summer is basically a time
for you to round out your skillset
by doing things that you can't do in the classroom.
Because of that I really don't recommend
taking an entire full time suite of summer courses
because that's basically constructing
an extra semester for yourself.
You're risking burnout and you're not giving yourself
that time to gain those other types of skills,
but if you have a really firm grasp on your graduation plan
you could maybe take one or two summer classes
in addition to an on campus opportunity or a job
and that could help you potentially graduate early
or just make your next semester easier
and have more time for activities on campus,
so it is an option.
Now for the fifth tip here,
one potential exception to my overall beliefs
about summer school is studying abroad.
You can study abroad during the summer
and while you're getting some classes done,
while you're getting some degree requirements
out of the way,
you're also getting a lot of new perspectives
on the world.
Now, this is actually something that I never did
as a student.
I did travel independently to Japan
during my senior summer with a couple of friends
and it was one of the coolest experiences of my life.
I definitely recommend going there,
but studying abroad could be a nice
combinatorial experience.
You could get that experience of traveling the world
but also get some school requirements out of the way.
We've talked about jobs, internships,
we talked about studying abroad and summer school,
and that brings us to the final thing
I wanted to talk about in this video
which is using your summer to pursue a personal project.
This is actually what I did during my third summer
between my junior and senior years,
and it is also one of the biggest mistakes
that I made as a college student.
I don't think pursuing a personal project
is a mistake at all.
In fact if you have a skill that you want to learn
that you can learn well on your own,
your summer is probably the best possible time
you're going to have to sink all the hours you need
to sink into it to truly master it.
If it's going to benefit you down the road,
that's an awesome thing to do.
What my mistake was,
was quitting absolutely everything else
and trying to dedicate my entire summer
to that personal project.
At the time my project which was College Info Geek
was doing well.
It was finally getting some really good traffic,
finally starting to make some money.
Logically I was like, "Well, if I dedicate every single hour
"of every single day to that instead of something else,
"that's the best use of my time."
What I didn't realize was that
without any constraints on my schedule,
I wasn't going to use my time efficiently
because there was nothing coming up during every day.
I'd wake up and I would think,
"I have every hour of this day to do something,"
so I never used any of those hours very efficiently.
It's like Parkinson's Law says,
"Work expands to fill the time you allot to it."
Time is kind of like air.
With air, when you compress it
you can do some useful things with it.
You can pump up your bike tires, for example.
As the space the air is in expands
and as that air gets thinner and thinner,
it gets less and less useful
to the point where it's so spread out
that you can't even breathe it.
Your productivity is affected by time as well.
If you allot too much time to something,
you're not going to be very productive.
You're going to be very inefficient with your time.
You'll be more prone to procrastination.
If you have something in your summer
that's constraining your schedule to a certain degree,
it doesn't have to be as much as it is during the semester
but just a little bit,
that's going to make you use the time you have left over
much more efficiently.
That about does it for this video, guys.
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