Skills Centre Updates
By Conor O’Driscoll (UCC Skills Centre Contributor)
With the semester approaching its midpoint, we at the Skills Centre are back again to offer a helping hand and point you towards some useful resources to get you through these hectic weeks.
In the last edition, we introduced you to the Skills Centre Roadmap. The objective of our roadmap is to roll out timely workshops in line with students' needs. These workshops take place in a small-scale learning environment and are facilitated by experienced peers who want to ensure you succeed in university. Subsequently, through these workshops we introduce you to vital skills.
We started our journey with the basics of becoming a university student, how to balance university with other aspects of your life, and how to navigate lectures, academic reading, and notetaking. From there, we focused our attention to assignments. From the vocabulary used to paragraph structure and answering the question, we have rolled out workshops which provide you with the skills necessary to tackle any and all forms of assessments with confidence and academic rigour.
We have since reached a new stop on our journey. Now, we wish to introduce students to the skills needed to fine-tune essays and master the elusive: referencing. Despite our advancement along our roadmap, it is never too late to avail of any workshop you desire. Every workshop runs for the duration of term once it is rolled out, and if the scheduled times do not suit, you can always avail of a one-to-one session. Just google UCC Skills Centre for more information!
As mentioned, currently we are rolling out workshops which introduce students to the skills needed to refine your writing and proofread your assignments, whilst also providing guidance on navigating academic referencing and avoiding plagiarism.
As many of you may be aware, completing the first draft of an assignment can often be rough. We urge students to not treat a finished first draft as an end product. Often, assignments are written in batches, over multiple days/weeks, making a coherent flow and structure difficult to attain. Subsequently, you can only really link it all together once this first draft is finished, something required on all marking schemes. As a result, we aim to provide more nuanced help on the writing side of university by rolling out workshops focusing on Discipline-specific Writing Skills and Editing and Proofreading more generally.
Discipline-specific Skills invoke techniques such as lab and business report writing, alongside advice on how to navigate group projects. Additionally, some of these workshops focus on Reviewing Literature, Writing Reflectively, and Presentation Skills. More-so relevant to postgraduate students, but also available to undergraduates, we also host workshops on Writing Abstracts, The Publication Process, and Planning Dissertations. Collectively, these workshops provide students with the tools necessary to elevate their writing skills, improvements which will enhance their grades and professional skills.
Complimenting these, is our rollout of workshops focusing on mastering the art of referencing and avoiding accidental plagiarism. You will be referencing and citing sources for your entire university career, so you may as well become prolific at it. We are here to show you how. Referencing is vital for many reasons. In general, it shows that you are not simply making stuff up, and that your arguments are sound, something evidenced by previous research which you cite. In an assignment context, it shows the breadth of your research, and provides clear evidence of the work you put into the assignment, something which may look favourable to marking schemes. As a result, we provide students with the knowledge on how to Paraphrase, Reference, and Choose Appropriate Sources.