A Roadmap To Success
By UCC Skills Centre
With semester one well underway by now, we at the Skills Centre hope everyone is settling in well.
We introduced ourselves in the last edition as a team of students and staff dedicated to providing a positive student (and staff!) experience across all university disciplines through our peer-to-peer workshops and one-to-one sessions. The core objective of these sessions is to enhance student learning in a collaborative environment and help you to develop the skills you need to succeed in professional and university settings.
Every year, the Skills Centre publishes a roadmap for success, whereby timely skills are introduced to students throughout the semester. The first stops on this roadmap concern being a college student, managing your time effectively, and navigating lecture material/recommended readings. To help you develop these skills, we host workshops on Time Management, Goal Setting and Motivation, Note Taking, and Classroom Etiquette.
At this point in our roadmap, we wish to show you that good organisation and realistic goal setting can make your life in university significantly easier. Furthermore, we illustrate how good organisation goes greatly with note taking, reading, and study skills. In this regard, we provide workshops which:
[1] Introduce you to techniques that can help you manage and balance your university, social, and work lives.
[2] Provide guidance on tackling college work when motivation is low.
[3] Illustrate various methods of note taking, alongside how to organise these notes to form study aids and how to read for university.
These workshops show that developing the skills of good organisation and methodical note taking early in the semester puts you in a great position to succeed in exams and assessments. Our workshops are run weekly, and if timetables clash, you can always avail of a one-to-one session, so it is never too late to join us.
In these, tutors work collaboratively with you on any issue you may be having regarding university life.
Currently on our road map, we have reached a new stop. This stop concerns everything to do with assignments.
Every assessment starts with a question which you must answer. Often, these questions are nuanced, complicated, and multi-faceted. Subsequently, through our workshops we provide guidance on how students can unpack these questions and evaluate precisely what they are looking for. Additionally, we show you that once this is achieved, planning your essay becomes much more straightforward, and we give you the tools necessary to excel at this planning.
Once you understand your essay question, the next step is to start writing an answer. However, writing in university invokes an alien, unfamiliar style of writing known as academic writing. The vocabulary you use, the way in which you structure your sentences, and how you outline your paragraphs all require careful consideration when building an academic argument. As a result, we provide a comprehensive scope of workshops on academic writing, essay structuring, and constructing an argument. These workshops provide students with the building blocks necessary to excel at essay writing in university.
If you like the sound of these, and think you could use the help, I urge you to book in for a session, or pop in for a chat. All our upcoming workshops are in Q-1 in the library, and to find us you just follow the yellow footsteps. If you cannot find time to drop by, that is perfectly fine, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram @UCCSkills. Alternatively, you can contact us through our website. Just Google UCC Skills Centre.
As mentioned, we are approaching the stage of our roadmap where assignments are on the horizon. Subsequently, we have numerous workshops coming up which will provide you with the foundations needed to excel in these.