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I hope you’re enjoying the holidays! It’s such a relief to be free of schedules and timetables for a while, right? As we said last week, rest, reconnect, enjoy being among your people. You need it, and you’ve earned it.
However, I do want to suggest two things that you may want to spend some of the time on.
The first is to tackle a specific piece of work that you may have found difficult in this first semester. I say that from personal experience. One of my majors at university was English. I grew up in an Afrikaans community in the Northern Cape, where I did not know a single English-speaking person. English was hard. In my second year, we had to study a very long poem called The Vision of Piers Plowman. It was written in Middle English, which was spoken in England around the year 1100 AD. I was completely lost. I did not understand more than a sentence or two. I felt hopeless, frustrated, almost angry. And then, during the winter holidays, I set aside an hour or so a day to go through it really slowly, looking up all the words, putting it together, making sense of it. By the end of three weeks, I could read that weird, mangled form of the English I knew almost fluently. It gave me an enormous feeling of relief and accomplishment and set me up for much better results in the second semester.
You may have something similar in one of your subjects, something that feels like an incomprehensible tangle that you will never master. Put some time aside, with no outside pressure to perform, and work at it slowly. If you have data and connectivity, ask AI to explain it to you. Otherwise, look for someone who may be able to help, like a teacher or an older student. If no one is available, trust yourself. Take it slowly. Give yourself space to look at it from all angles. You may be pleasantly surprised at what you can achieve.
Secondly, this is a great time to go revisit your goals. Did you make a vision board at some point, a collection of pictures and words to clarify your dream for your future? Try! It could look like this:
Or it could look like this:
Spend some time dreaming, and then work it back: to get there, what do you have to do in the next six months, and the next year, and the next five years? Remember to make your goals SMART:
It doesn’t only have to be about studies. Perhaps you have a side hustle that you want to get off the ground. Whatever it is, make it practical. Get a piece of paper and think it through like this:
It’s hard to imagine or dream about things you’ve never seen. If you come from a small, poverty-stricken community, you may not have role models for all the things you yourself are capable of. Investec has a great website to help you understand your own abilities and preferences, and to give you ideas for what you can do with it. It’s called CareerXplora. (If you can’t go online now, make a note to do it as soon as you’re back where you have wifi.) Spend some time doing the personality test and getting to know yourself, and then go back to that vision board. Things may change.
Enjoy the holidays!
From the GRAD team
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