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.

Hopefully you enjoyed it

and if you did you can give it a like

to support this channel.

Wow, this looks like a thumbs down.

If you want to get new videos

on how to be a more effective student

every single week you can click that Subscribe button

right above, wink,

and if you want to get a free copy of my book

on how to earn better grades,

well a digital one at least,

you can go right there.

Previous video's right there.

Full article is right there.

I'm about to pass out.

If you wanted to connect with me,

just use the social media links right there.

See ya.