What to Do the Summer Before Art School (Besides Panic)
How to arrive at art school in September actually prepared: the sketchbook habit, the software basics, the admin that bites late, and what to deliberately not do.
Student Life 8 min read
You got the place. The confirmation email has been screenshotted to the family group chat. Now there are roughly ten weeks between you and a studio, and the question is what to do with them, beyond refreshing the accommodation portal.
Here is the honest answer: less than you fear, more than nothing. This is the summer list that actually pays off in October, and the list of things you can guiltlessly skip.
Keep one habit alive
The single highest-value thing you can do all summer costs under a tenner: a cheap A5 sketchbook and a page a day. Not good pages. Pages. Draw the kettle, the queue, your nan’s dog, the same tree eleven times.
The reason is not the drawings. It is that the first weeks of art school run on visual confidence, and confidence is a habit that decays over a workless summer like fitness does. The students who wobble in October are rarely the least talented; they are the ones arriving cold. Ten minutes a day means you arrive warm. Musicians, filmmakers and games students: same rule, different verbs. Practise something, shoot something, prototype something, small and daily.
Learn the boring 20 per cent of the software
You do not need to master anything, but arriving with zero software vocabulary makes week one slower than it needs to be. One hour a week on the fundamentals of your discipline’s core tool is enough: layers and masks for image work, a timeline and cuts for film, a DAW’s basic signal path for music production.
Two rules before spending money: check whether your university provides Adobe or equivalent licences (many do, and it is buried in the IT pages), and if it does not, learn on the free tools that are genuinely industry-adjacent rather than buying anything in August.
Look at things on purpose
Art school assumes an appetite for looking, and summer is the cheapest time to build one. One exhibition, gallery, gig or screening every fortnight, plus five minutes writing down what you actually thought of it (not what you suspect you should have thought). That written opinion habit is precisely the muscle crits will demand, and you can build it for the price of a railcard trip. Regional galleries count. So does the good graffiti near the retail park.
Do the admin that bites late
The unglamorous list, each ten minutes now or a bad week in September:
- Student finance: confirm the application is approved and pointing at the right course, especially if you came through Clearing.
- Accommodation: application in, contract read, packing planned but not bought.
- The applicant portal: enrolment tasks, ID uploads and induction bookings appear from mid-August with quiet deadlines.
- Money reality: work out your actual weekly budget once rent leaves the loan. Do it now, calmly, rather than in October, emotionally. If the number frightens you, a flexible creative job lined up before term beats hunting for one in freshers’ week.
- Health: register with a GP near campus in week one; put it in the diary now.
What to deliberately not do
Do not build a whole new portfolio; that job is done. Do not buy the full materials list some influencer posted; your course will issue its own and half the fancy kit goes unused. Do not read six theory books out of guilt; one, enjoyed, beats six skimmed. And do not spend August constructing a perfect version of yourself for September. Courses selected the person in the sketchbook, not a finished professional. The culture shock guide covers what the first term actually feels like.
The one-line summer plan
A page a day, an hour of software a week, something looked at every fortnight, the admin list cleared by September. Everything else is optional, including the panic.