UCC Skills Centre Roadmap
By Conor O’Driscoll (Skills Centre Contributor)
As assignment deadlines approach, we at the Skills Centre wanted to give you all a recap on what we have been up to since term began and how we may be able to help you with any issues you may be having in university.
The previous three columns have served to introduce the UCC community to the Skills Centre and have provided insights on how we can help both students (and staff) succeed in university should they find themselves in need of help. We offer this help primarily through small-scale workshops, facilitated by student peers, which are designed to introduce students (and staff) to timely skills needed to excel at university. We also offer these services in one-to-one tutoring environments.
Every semester, the Skills Centre adopts a roadmap to success which influences the timing of our workshop rollout. And once rolled out, workshops are run regularly until the end of term. For instance, at the start of each term, we go back to basics. This means we focus on Becoming a University Student and introduce students to fundamental skills such as Notetaking, and Time Management. Subsequently, the workshops we rollout emphasize notetaking in lectures, navigating academic readings, goal setting, and balancing your university life with your personal life.
As the term goes on, we reach different stops in our roadmap. The first group of stops cover everything related to Assignments. Every assessment starts with a question. Once the question is identified, you must then answer it. The vocabulary you use, the way in which you structure your sentences, and how you outline your paragraphs all require careful consideration when conveying an argument in assessments. As a result, we provide a comprehensive scope of workshops on Answering the Question, Academic Writing, Essay Structuring, and Constructing Arguments.
From there, we zoom in on some of the nuanced issues facing university students. Specifically, we rollout workshops covering Discipline-specific Skills, Editing and Proofreading, Referencing and Plagiarism, and Refining Academic Writing more generally. These workshops prioritise the fine-tuning of academic skills by providing training in report writing, presentation skills, and group work, alongside a deep-dive into referencing, citing sources appropriately, and identifying suitable references. Complimenting these workshops, are the more nuanced Writing Abstracts, The Publication Process, and Planning Dissertations, which aim to provide advanced guidance to students on how to navigate research projects and get the most out of their hard work.
You will be delighted to know that you are officially caught up on everything Skills Centre related. The workshops mentioned above are all in circulation and will run regularly until the end of term. But what about the future?
The upcoming stops on our roadmap involve the rollout of workshops designed to show students how to make the most of assignment feedback and offer guidance on how to reflect on the effectiveness of their current practices, methods, and techniques when studying, writing, reading, and being a university student more generally. Additionally, we highlight the value of study groups, study coaches, and the incorporation of peer-review practices into your workload, whereby classmates/friends evaluate the quality of your work.
The final destination on our roadmap naturally concerns exams. Here we introduce students to potential study strategies, study skills, and exam preparation more generally. In these, we illustrate how refining your notes (which are exceptionally organised) can serve as great study aids and significantly enhance your learning.
If you feel you would benefit from some of these workshops, do not hesitate to drop in for a chat or book-in for a workshop or one-to-one session. All of our workshops run year-round once they are rolled out.