Study skills hub

Designing presentations in PowerPoint and Google Slides

Tuesday 5 May 2026 10am - 12pm

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

How can you create presentation slides that are memorable and impactful while also being accessible? PowerPoint and Google Slides include many under-exploited features that can help you create more effective presentations (as well as other resources). This session explores the principles of designing presentations, including templates, animation, accessibility principles, and working with media. We'll also look at presentation features in these tools that can help you as you convey your material to an audience.

Presentations Practical Guide

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Creating Interactive Graphs in RStudio

Tuesday 5 May 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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PGT Dissertation Writing 2: Methods and Results

Wednesday 6 May 2026 10.30am - 12pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Postgraduates

This workshop is for postgraduate taught students only. It will look at the purpose of methodology and results sections, and then go on to examine how they can be structured and the sort of information they typically contain. We will give a brief summary of the most popular software used to help you analyse your data and present it in your report. This workshop will also focus on the skills and language needed to write these sections of a dissertation.

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The Distractibles Meetup Online

Wednesday 6 May 2026 12.30pm - 1.30pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Students/staff

Finding it hard to focus and plagued by distractions? Join The Distractibles Meetup online on the first Wednesday of each month, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. We are a support group of staff and students with small group chat and an ideas bank of things 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: Framing your research question

Wednesday 6 May 2026 2pm - 4pm

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

In this session, focused primarily on postgraduate research but applicable to any research project, we'll consider how to come up with a workable research question with regard to available literature: is there enough information to provide a suitable background? What limits will you need to set? We'll explore how to scope a range of different sources, including academic, government and organisational literature.

Searching for information: Framing your research

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Create a Graphic in Adobe Illustrator

Thursday 7 May 2026 10am - 12pm

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

Interested to try out a graphic designer tool for the first time?

Using the Creativity Lab's access to Adobe Illustrator, this practical session will guide you through creating your own graphic design. We will focus on the most useful tools and hacks to create a logo or clipart illustration, with a useful step-by-step written handbook that we will share with you during the session. No prior knowledge is required. We will also share information on other alternate tools that can be used.

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Digital cutting with Cricut

Thursday 7 May 2026 1pm - 2pm

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

Digital cutters allow you to create digital designs on a computer and then have the machine cut out that design on your material of choice, like card, vinyl, and iron-on transfers. These creations can then be added to other things, for example adding a vinyl transfer to a mug or an iron-on transfer to material like a t-shirt.

In YorCreate we have a Cricut Maker 3 which you can use once you've had a YorCreate induction (though you don't need to have had an induction to come along to this session). In this session we'll look at some approaches you could try, and offer a demonstration of how the cutter works.

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Getting Started with SPSS

Thursday 7 May 2026 2pm - 4pm

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

This session is for people who have never used SPSS before or who want a refresher. You will learn how to get data in, quick ways of cleaning your data, running basic statistics and how to create graphs in SPSS.

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