Doing the nightfall makes ranking up a lot easier as experience and faction rep increase a little bit. After that do challenges and lots of patrols. Now someone might say do strikes but in all honesty you can do a couple of patrols and get the same number of rep in a shorter time then you would by doing a strike. Even the Vanguard ROC strike list only gives you 25 rep (should seriously be more then this). Instead of opening parcels as after ranking up wait until you have 5 or more in your mail box. You might get some good stuff out of it.