Study skills hub
Source: https://www.york.ac.uk/students/studying/skills/ Parent: https://www.york.ac.uk/students/support/
Develop academic and communication skills to help you learn more effectively.
You need strong study skills to succeed throughout your degree. To help you develop, we offer four types of service to suit different learning styles:
- online learning guides
- hands-on experience and use of equipment
- one-to-one support
- workshops
Where to start
Related links
Skills Guides
Our Skills Guides are online resources to develop your academic writing, digital skills and more.
Subject Guides
Our Subject Guides include Library resources and support for your subject and contact details for your Faculty Librarians.
Common topics
Managing your reading
Finding credible information
Academic writing
English language support
Digital skills
Maths and stats
Academic integrity and referencing
Critical thinking
Assessment and feedback
Dissertations and literature reviews
Organising yourself
Presentations and speaking
Need more?
One-to-one appointments
One-to-one appointments for academic writing, maths skills, data skills, and study coaching are tailored to your specific needs.
Equipment hire
Hire a range of digital tools and equipment from our Creativity Lab.
Forthcoming study and digital skills workshops
Event
UG Dissertation Writing 3: Discussion & Conclusion
Friday 20 March 2026 11am - 12.30pm
Organiser: Academic Skills\ Location: online\ Open to: Undergraduates
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.
Event
How to Get a First (All UGs)
Monday 23 March 2026 1pm - 2.30pm
Organiser: Academic Skills\ Location: online\ Open to: Undergraduates
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.
Event
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
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.
Event
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
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
Event
Getting Started with RStudio
Tuesday 24 March 2026 2pm - 4pm
Organiser: Academic Skills\ Location: online\ Open to: Everyone
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.
Event
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
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
Event
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
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
Event
DIGITAL WEDNESDAYS: Working with data in spreadsheets
Wednesday 25 March 2026 2pm - 4pm
Organiser: Digital Skills & Creativity Lab\ Location: online\ Open to: Everyone
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.
Event
How to read an academic article
Thursday 26 March 2026 1pm - 2pm
Organiser: Academic Skills\ Location: online\ Open to: Everyone
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
Event
Creating Interactive Graphs in RStudio
Thursday 26 March 2026 2pm - 3pm
Organiser: Academic Skills\ Location: online\ Open to: Everyone
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.
Event
How to Edit your Writing
Friday 27 March 2026 11am - 12.30pm
Organiser: Academic Skills\ Location: online\ Open to: Everyone
How to Edit your Writing
Friday 27 March 2026 11am - 12.30pm
Organiser: Academic Skills\ Location: online\ Open to: Everyone
If you find it difficult to edit your work effectively this is the session for you. During this workshop, you will learn how to redraft your work by focusing on 6 key areas which help with editing. Please find related online resources here: https://subjectguides.york.ac.uk/academic-writing
All forthcoming study and digital skills workshops
Contact us
Contact the Library Help desk with any questions you have about study skills.