For students, summers often mean sitting by a pool and enjoying the sun. But what most don’t realize is that summer’s the perfect time to prep for the fall semester. And that doesn’t just mean buying pens and notebooks. Imagine if you could learn to code in one month, or memorize your campus map for maximum sleeping in, or even get ahead on book and course materials so you can concentrate on studying.
Here are 5 tools students can use this summer that will help them turbo-charge the upcoming school year:
Memorize Your New Campus:
Whether you go to a private or public university, the average size of a campus in the US is around 1,500 acres. So don’t let yourself get lost and get to know your campus better with Quad2Quad. Acting like a virtual travel assistant, this site helps students find their dorm room, future academic buildings and memorize the cafeteria.
Learn Spanish Verbs By The Pool
Why not use your summer to learn a new language on your phone? On Duolingo you can learn Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Irish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and English for free. Get light years ahead of your Spanish 201 classmates.
Get Insider Info:
Should you sign up for morning classes? What professors are awesome? College Confidential lets you interact with other students to find out what’s REALLY going on in campus. OneClass is a community of over 2.2 million+ university students sharing valuable course content such as lecture notes, textbook summaries and exam study guides
Learn to Code:
Bored with Netflix marathons? Why not learn to code on Udemy? Udemy offers online classes and boot camps where you can learn to build websites or mobile apps from the comfort of your stuffy couch. In 2015 alone, there were 7 million job openings that required coding as an applicable skill. So get ahead of the curve, and who knows, you might find your new major or minor.
Get Ahead:
Course Hero helps empower students and teachers to succeed in their classes. An online learning community that connects millions of students and educators to share their knowledge and resources, Course Hero helps members to ask and answer any question in any course. You can also avoid the headache of choosing courses by searching for what students are saying about certain courses on their Course Advice page. And want to get a jump start on course materials over the summer? They have infographics available that summarize and analyze some of the most important books you’ll find next school year, like The Canterbury Tales, Crime & Punishment, Heart of Darkness, and many more.
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