Semester Breaks: The Untapped Resource for Superior Learners

Semester breaks are psychological lines. These lines separate the learners who study only for the exams and the ones who seek meaning in learning.¹

The reason is, each semester break is a breathing space woven into the marathon of your university life, a space where the study load of the exams and assignments are less felt.

And in the quiet of this breathing space, you can hear a small voice: ‘This is the time to relax.’

That voice is not lying.

The study load during the semester is exhausting, even for students who are barely hardworking. You burn a lot of energy mentally and emotionally.²

But danger looms through that voice.

It exaggerates how much recovery you actually need. For healthy individuals, the physical and mental recoveries need days, not months.

Yet according to that voice, this is how you relax for the entire semester breaks:

Stream as many series or movies as you can.
Play as many computer games as possible.
Eat your mum’s cooking endlessly (because it is free, and you will not have it once you go back to college).
Lie down on your bed or sofa, infinitely scrolling through those funny short videos on social media.
Sleep late, because there is no morning class tomorrow.

But deep in your heart, you know that those kinds of ‘relaxation’ do not help with recovery.

They hardly make you more fit and recharged. They also only mask that background stress, that angst you feel when you sit quietly, when you are alone without your phone.

They make you feel bloated and weak.

As someone who has made the same mistakes, I promise you will regret surrendering to that voice.

Perhaps you will not regret it tonight.

The regret might come only after you graduate, when you are cut and bled by the ruthless competition of the market, because you realise that you have squandered the chances of preparing yourself when you were an undergraduate.

Study revision is not the key priority

I do not believe you should prioritise revising specific subjects in your degree programme.

The flexibility you have during semester breaks is ideal for developing overall skills. That means you spend less time studying specific topics for your degree courses, and more time on areas which improve your life overall:

1. Look ahead

Spend time looking at where you are financially (independently of your parents) and your career direction.

Learn more about how money and jobs work. Talk to seniors who graduated from your degree programme. Read or listen to people online who are working in your field. What are their daily lives like?³

Pay more attention to those in your country (or city, if you live in a huge country). The reason to focus more locally is to avoid misleading your thinking that your career experience will be like what you see overseas.

2. Get your feet wet

Ask lecturers for an internship in their labs. Ask your aunt if you could help at her company. Reach out to that person you admire and ask to be a personal assistant in their project.

Temporary apprenticeships give you a chance to get a glance at working experience. You will have a better sense of whether your current career path is the one you want to stay on.

3. Study about you

Coming from a low-income family, I used to think that career-personality compatibility is just a luxury; as long as you get good money, whatever the job is, it will be right for me.

For many, that is unfortunately true. After you graduate, you need to just take whatever job you can get. This is when employers dominate the job market.

But the tides are changing.

Since the pandemic, millions of people either tang ping⁴or outright resign.⁵

It increases the economic demand for employees. That means there may be more opportunities in the shuffling to choose a job that suits you.

But you cannot take advantage of that if you know too little about yourself.

So, during semester breaks, think and talk to mentors about your career-personality compatibility. To help you, some tests are available online.⁶

4. Level up

Train yourself on your general skills and knowledge. These are the ones that may not be directly tested in your degree programme.

For example, study how language works and how to write better, even if you are not a Linguistics student. Learn to type faster and find keyboard shortcuts. Learn other useful features of the apps you use for studying. Read the history and philosophy of your fields. Develop personalised strategies to organise digital materials.

In the short term, they speed up your rate of learning when the semester breaks ends. In the long run, they make you more attractive in the job competition.⁷

5. Heal your routines

Heal both physical and spiritual routines.

Sleep early to pray Fajr on time. And take your sleep hygiene seriously.⁸ Fast more often. It heals your relationship with hunger and other urges.⁹ Look into the commentaries of the Qur’anic verses you read. Work out or play sports until your heart rate goes into Target Heart Rate zones.¹⁰

Habits take time to develop. Don’t delay it. If you heal your daily routine now, you can hit the ground running as soon as the semester break ends.

Spend time with your parents during semester breaks

Along with those five practical items, also seek opportunities to spend more time with your parents.

Help your mother wash the dishes. Help your father clean the toilet. This is especially valuable for guys to develop their inner warriors. It disintegrates your egoistic arrogance. You learn the spiritual ethos of being a respectable leader and a desirable husband.

In the end, I pray that what I wrote here brings you strengths, so that when you hear the small voice: ‘This is the time to relax,’ you can answer it back, ‘No, this is the time to get better. This is the time to become a profound, superior learner.’

1
See Finding Meaning in Learning.
2
It can get to a point where you suffer burnout. It is better to take prophylactic steps. See Burnout Prevention and Treatment.
3
Talk also to people who don’t stand out, who are wise and quiet. See Design Your Life Story, Listen to ‘Unsuccessful’ People.
4
Tang ping means ‘lying flat’, which is a Chinese social movement against working long, tiring hours. See What is ‘Tang Peng’ movement.
5
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a phenomenon called The Great Resignation has accelerated where millions quit their jobs. See Great Resignation Shows no Signs of Slowing Down.
6
See Free Career Aptitude and Career Assessment Tests. My scientific and philosophical training taught me to be careful about measuring personal reality. So use the results only as guidance to reflect on how you see yourself.
7
Related to the Great Resignation mentioned earlier, it also means you will be competing with people who are already working who want to change jobs. The percentages of workers who are seeking a new job are high in countries like Singapore (59%), Malaysia (61%), Australia (48%), New Zealand (50%) and the UK (55%). See Is The ‘Great Resignation’ Spreading In Malaysia?
8
See Sleep Hygiene.
9
Islamic philosopher and theologian al-Ghazali (d. 1111) emphasised the close interactions between two desires: food and sex. He also analysed indirect desires to fulfil those two desires, such as the desire for money, which relates to gaining food and sexual attractiveness. See Al-Ghazali on Disciplining the Soul and on Breaking the Two Desires.
10
If you do not have a measuring device, use this Target Heart Rate (THR) Calculator to determine your THR. Then, while exercising, count your pulse (beats per minute) for the first few sessions, and link it to your breathing intensity and how your body feels when you are in the THR zones. Use that as a qualitative marker. So that later, you do not need to measure your pulse anymore. Just monitor your breathing intensity to get into the THR zones.