Subject Guides: A practical guide for second-year students: Useful skills

Organise & analyse

Skills Guide: Managing your reading
Strategies for managing your reading
Skills Guide: Maths skills
Mathematics and statistics advice from the Maths Skills Centre.
Skills Guide: Time management
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

Create & communicate

Skills Guide: Academic writing
The principles and practicalities of writing a piece of academic work.
Skills Guide: Creating documents
A detailed look at setting up, creating and finalising documents in Word or Google Docs.

Being critical

Let's get critical: Critical thinking
Critical thinking skills are important for engaging with academic literature and informing your own writing.
Let's get critical: Evaluating information
How do you know if something's any good or not? Or even if the information is genuine? What are the questions to ask?
Let's get critical: Reading academic articles
Academic texts aren't meant to be read through from beginning to end, so how are they meant to be read?
Let's get critical: Critical reading
It's important to question what you read. Here we look at some of the different approaches to take.

Take a look at our guide to using IT at York, from getting started to making the most of devices and tools.

Training

We run a number of skills training sessions each term.

Digital skills training sessions and Digital Wednesdays are open to all members of the University. Academic Skills Community and other sessions may be limited to students only. You can filter the list to only show sessions of relevance to staff or research postgraduates.

To book onto a session, follow its link below (you'll need to log in to the booking system). If a session you're interested in is full, sign up onto the waiting list — if we have enough interest in a session we may repeat it. You'll also find copies of our slides throughout the Skills Guides