How to prepare for SMC in October?

I want to achieve silver/gold, how should I prep?

Have you done the imc before, how did you find it / what did you get? Any particular reason for wanting to get those grades on the smc?

Yes I've done IMC got bronze, I want to do SMC because I generally enjoy maths and also to boost my application for Unis because I know that some of my gcses aren't going to be as high as other candidates e.g my combined science and religious studies

It will have limited/little value in boosting your university application as I presume it'll be a "one liner" in your personal statement about the grade you achieved. If youve done a bit of reading around / practice then that might flesh it out / show some interest, but it wont really compensate if you didnt get the required gcse ... grades.
But if you want to do some practice, then drfrost has a fair number of past papers/questions on line
https://www.drfrost.org/worksheets.php?wdid=44
and as the papers are not that different, maybe do some imc then bump up to the smc? He also has some slides about smc/mat/step but these are probably a bit much. There are also some past papers on the ukmt web.
Id guess the key thing is to not be too worried about timing etc, and simply spend some time on questions and work out different ways to get the answer, before looking at the model solution. Most questions shouldnt require that much working (a few lines?) and often a bit of problem solving is key (so simplify the problem, sketch, work backwards, guestimate ....). Once you get in the swing of things, then start practicing on actual (timed) papers.

Thanks so much!! Yeah I prepared for IMC using dfm and the website itself, my school offers it so I will ofc do it, I can retake it next year aswell so its okay

I guess a few general comments which may / may not be applicable but it looks like youre doing m/fm/... a levels starting next autumn. A rough guestimate is jmc is ~95% ks3, imc is ~70% ks4 and smc is ~20% ks5 so dont expect it to correlate too much with your a level content (no calculus, limited trig, geometry heavy, ...). I believe some smc practice is worthwhile in terms of improving problem solving, basic algebra, sketching functions, .... but its fairly generic things rather than specific a level topics.
Youre, probably correctly, viewing it as something to put on your ps for maths/econ degree? As above, the unis wont necessarily pay that much attention to you saying "i got gold" or something like that. Similarly it wont really compensate for gcse/a level grades. If you said that you read about xxx and yyy and learnt zzz and ... and practiced it on smc-type questions, it will make a more interesting ps (obv the ps is changing format somewhat next year). So when doing individual questions, do a bit of background reading about the context so thales similar triangles or relative motion or harmonic means or area decomposition or .... You shouldnt need much beyond gcse maths to do smc, but questions can look unusual if youve not seen something similar before and doing a bit of reading can help make it sticky.

how are we all feeling so far,