Study skills hub

Finding academic literature - going beyond your reading list

Thursday 19 March 2026 1pm - 3pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

When you do a Google search or a search of the Library's resources, you will potentially be faced with a massive reading list. How do you choose which are the best texts? Who do you trust? Where do you get the most reliable data from? In this session you will learn some of the best places for finding academic information and how to select the most appropriate reading for the task you have to complete.

Being critical: Evaluating information Searching for information: Academic sources

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YorCreate: So you want to 3D print a D&D miniature?

Thursday 19 March 2026 5pm - 6.30pm

Organiser: Digital Skills & Creativity Lab
Location: LFA/132 YorCreate (Harry Fairhurst Building, Campus West)
Open to: Everyone

Have you ever wanted to create your own custom miniature figurines for tabletop gaming? In this session we’ll look at how you can digitally design a 3D miniature for Dungeons & Dragons and similar games, and we’ll share our advice for how to most-effectively 3D print your miniatures. We’ll also consider what other peripheral items we could print, such as dice towers and dungeon tiles.

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UG Dissertation Writing 3: Discussion & Conclusion

Friday 20 March 2026 11am - 12.30pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Undergraduates

This final session explores how we discuss our results and bring everything together in a compelling way. How do we find meaning in our results and relate them to the literature? What questions do our results raise, and how can we acknowledge and account for unforeseen limitations of our research? Finally we will look at how we tie the discussion section back to our introduction, and how to write a compelling abstract.

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How to Get a First (All UGs)

Monday 23 March 2026 1pm - 2.30pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Undergraduates

This workshop helps you decide where to focus your energies to enable you to move from good to even better in your academic work. If you are aiming high, you will get ideas for what markers might see in your work to convince them your work deserves that top grade.

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Create a simple 2D platformer game

Tuesday 24 March 2026 10am - 12pm

Organiser: Digital Skills & Creativity Lab
Location: LFA/103 Creativity Lab (Harry Fairhurst Building, Campus West)
Open to: Everyone

Let's make a simple platform game. Games can be a brilliant tool to aid learning, or share your study/research.

Using a tool called Gdevelop, we'll look at the beginner steps to build your first simple game, with step-by-step instructions and lots of time to have a go yourself. We'll look at some of the key areas of game mechanics, and have some time to plan out our ideas for a simple game. No coding knowledge is required. This is an in-person session in the Creativity Lab.

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Searching the literature more effectively: comparing traditional and AI strategies

Tuesday 24 March 2026 1pm - 2pm

Organiser: Digital Skills & Creativity Lab
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

Can generative AI help with the task of finding academic, peer-reviewed literature relating to an assessment or research project? Can it assist if you wanted to find all the news articles that mention a specific topic or person (for instance, John Bowes Morrell)?

Come along to this one-hour session where we will critically examine the effectiveness of using generative AI tools for finding relevant information for an essay, dissertation, or other research project, whilst also considering how generative AI approaches compare to traditional, non-AI search tools and resources.

This session will be particularly useful for taught students but is open to anyone at the University.

Generative AI: a Practical Guide

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Getting Started with RStudio

Tuesday 24 March 2026 2pm - 4pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

This workshop will introduce you to the RStudio interface, and writing R code to import, manage and plot data. Suitable for people who have not done any computer coding before, but would like to use RStudio in the future to carry out statistical analyses.

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Critical Thinking: What It Is and How to Do It

Wednesday 25 March 2026 10.30am - 12pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

Students are often told that they need to think critically. In this session, you will learn how you think critically all the time and how to apply this to thinking critically in your studies. There will be clear examples of critical thinking and we will show you how you can do this in a number of academic contexts. Please find related online resources here:https://subjectguides.york.ac.uk/academic-writing

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The Distractibles Meetup

Wednesday 25 March 2026 12.30pm - 1.30pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: LFA/144 Academic Skills workshop room (Harry Fairhurst Building, Campus West)
Open to: Students/staff

Finding it hard to focus and plagued by distractions? Join The Distractibles Meetup on Wednesdays, 12.30pm to 1.30pm in the Library, LFA/144. We are a support group of staff and students with small group chat and accessibility ideas to try. Whether you're neurodivergent or just easily distracted, our peer-support group might be just the thing for you. The Distractibles

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DIGITAL WEDNESDAYS: Working with data in spreadsheets

Wednesday 25 March 2026 2pm - 4pm

Organiser: Digital Skills & Creativity Lab
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

It's one thing getting some data; it's another thing knowing what to do with it. In this session we'll take a look at methods for finding, importing, and cleaning up data, and performing simple analyses in a spreadsheet. We'll also consider principles for structuring data, and how you can reshape it to suit different needs.

Essential Spreadsheets

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How to read an academic article

Thursday 26 March 2026 1pm - 2pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

Where do you start when looking at academic literature? How can you successfully engage with the literature you find?

You don't need an AI summary tool to understand most journal articles — there's usually already ways for you to get to the important information quickly. This bitesized session will explore the structure of academic articles, show where to look to check the validity of findings, and offer tips for navigating online texts.

This training will be delivered online via Zoom.

Being critical: Reading academic articles Searching for information: Academic sources

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Creating Interactive Graphs in RStudio

Thursday 26 March 2026 2pm - 3pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

This session will cover how to make interactive graphs in RStudio. You will learn how to go beyond simple bar or scatter graphs, and make them more interesting, such as animating a graph, building 3D graphs, and creating a moving gif of your graph. Suitable for people who have used RStudio previously and would like to create interactive graphs from their data in the future.

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