The days are warm and long, the beach and pool beckons you regularly, and friends and family are scheduling road trips – in other words, it’s the summer! Whether you are taking just a class or two or are lucky enough to have the whole summer free, summer brain drain can apply just as much in college as it did when you were in high school.

So instead of finding out that your mad Photoshop skills have degraded and that After Effects has once again become an enigma, try to keep your skills up during this time off!

Here are just a few ideas of ways you can practice (while still enjoying your time off):

Design (or update) your portfolio

You’re going to need a portfolio for the program and to get your work out to potential employers so why not get a jump-start figuring out what it’s going to look like and what kind of content you want to eventually include? If you’ve already made a portfolio, have you created any new work in the past school year that you’d like to include or swap out?

Watch some tutorial videos

This is pretty well known among the FSCJ digital media students but there are a ton of great (and free!) tutorials online that cover pretty much every piece of software we have in the labs. Was there a point your professor didn’t get to cover in as much detail or something that was especially tricky for you? There are probably some great tutorials out there for you to refresh and expand your understanding of that technique.

Give yourself an assignment

What?! This one sounds suspiciously like work, huh? But unlike assignments that you get in a class, you can design this assignment yourself!
Have you ever heard of Project 365? Well who says they have to start on January 1st? (You could start on July 1st and create your own “project 184”!) Or maybe there’s a video or animation idea you’ve had but haven’t have the time to work on it? Have you wanted to learn more about Cinemagraphs? WordPress? Pinterest? Behance? Give yourself an assignment to learn or do any of these things and you’ll find that the practice will give you a huge head start in the fall.

Whatever you choose to do, remember the important thing is to just not stagnate. Keep up with your skills, review and discover new techniques, or finally take a step towards creating that cool project that you envisioned during the school year but you knew you were just too busy at the time to attempt. August is just around the corner – be prepared!