Take our quiz to find out what your revision personality is! >>

part time job and 4 alevels help pls !!

i currently work 12 hours a week alongside doing 4 alevels - maths, further maths, physics and economics. i have a busy schedule with only one or two lunchtimes free a week, two free periods where i typically go to the gym if i can to stay active and then my evenings are busy every day apart from fridays which i keep for homework. all my money from working is going straight to driving lessons leaving me no money left to spend on hanging out and general stuff and so my mum said i need to up my hours to 15 a week, bearing in mind i also tutor for an hour on mondays. while i get that my hours do need to go up in order to pay for everything, i barely have time as it is to do all my work and prepare for uni - competitive degree and applying for oxford and my grades in economics and physics are slipping as it's getting difficult. my colleges also reccommends no more than 8hrs for a typical 3 course student so with 4courses and 12hrs i'm already well over.

i'm not sure what to do - do i up my hours at work to maybe 14 and then find another person to tutor so i then tutor for 2 hours a week as well or what. how badly will this affect my alevels and is this manageable because my entrance requirements are two a* and two a's and my physics is currently a c and borderline a in economics

Reply 1

Mona123456

Original post by virgoamelia

Hi there,

This sounds like a difficult situation. Personally, I would say that your grades are the most important stepping stone for your future, and if you're applying for Oxford, that means in Y13 you'll have a lot of work for the application. If you go to Oxford (or even a similar campus Uni), the chances of needing a car are slim. Is it a priority to have driving lessons now? If there's a specific reason you need to pass soon, then it may be important to continue to have driving lessons right now, but otherwise, I would say it may be worth pausing those and taking them later on. Two key benefits (in addition to reducing your stress now) are that the long Uni holidays would lend themselves well to e.g. intensive courses / having lots of lessons to practice and then take the test, and secondly, you'd likely find it easier to earn money at Uni to fund them (e.g. you could charge more or find more tutoring opportunities as a Uni student, relative to now being in Y12). In essence, if you could pause your driving lessons for now, then you could reduce your working/tutoring hours slightly, and use that money for only fun stuff, and have more time to focus on your studies too.

If you really need to continue with the driving lessons now, you only have so many hours a day. If your grades are still important to you, work out how much time you need to spend to get your grades up to the level you want. From there, work out how many hours you have for working/tutoring, after fitting in gym, key social events, etc. Then try and think how you can optimise this number of hours you have to work: out of your job and tutoring, which pays more? Are there other companies in either industry paying more that could reliably give you the number of hours you want? If you're e.g. tutoring for £15/hr and could find other companies/clients offering £20/hr this could significantly help. For your social events, try suggesting creative options that are less expensive too - e.g. watching a movie and cooking pizzas yourself rather than ordering Dominos, or going to a house party that's BYOB rather than going out for cocktails, could all help to ease the pressure on your finances.

Hopefully this helps! I'd also note that Oxford / most Unis generally request 3 A-levels rather than 4, so once you get offers it may be the case that you can prioritise 3 subjects rather than 4 if absolutely necessary (I wouldn't recommend dropping a subject after getting offers as this could technically cause a problem if you declared 4 subjects on your UCAS application as then the UCAS info the offer was based on becomes inaccurate. But, if your offer is for 3 A-levels, you could email an admissions team to check if you can drop the 4th, or if not, just aim lower in that subject and try to get the higher grades in the other 3 subjects, if you feel you'd otherwise be spreading yourself thin).