301 Skills Sessions
Maddy, BA Business Management with Employment Experience student, and Luke, BA Business Management and Economics, share why 301 skills sessions are helpful and how you can make the most of them.
Luke: The 301 centre is a great place to find support, almost tutoring, if you’re struggling with your course. Personally, I’ve used the 1-1 maths and stats help quite frequently, it’s a massive help! There have been occasions when I have found worksheets or tutorials quite difficult and understandably lecturers don’t always have the time to go through worksheets individually with students.
Academic Skills Refresher Session:
Maddy: An academic skills refresher session was a great way to ease me back into my studies after having the summer off. The main aim is to help identify what your studying approach has been over the last year, and how it has developed. As well as celebrating academic achievements and looking for new ways to develop and enhance my skills. I found it to be a fulfilling experience and extremely helpful to look back to what I had done well, and it gave me the motivation to get stuck into the academic year ahead. It was also useful for me to find gaps in my skills that need to be focused on, therefore allowing me to go away and reflect on what needs to be done to enrich certain skills that were necessary for my academic success.
One-to-One Session:
Maddy: One-to-One sessions can be booked for a range of issues. I chose to have one to help me with time management and academic reading struggles. My session was extremely beneficial and provided me with lots of helpful resources to solve my issues. They gave me tables and documents to help structure my days and tasks into most urgent and least urgent. This allowed me to plan my days better and relieved the stress of having too much on in one day. Secondly, they gave me tables for structuring my academic reading for each module. These reading tables gave me an idea of what was important when reading and took the pressure off from needing to read and remember every single article. These both led to me feeling better leading up to assignments and understanding what was necessary.
Luke: Booking in a 1-1 MASH help session is super easy and you can do it online via MUSE. It takes no longer than 2 minutes. In the winter exam season I attended multiple 1-1 sessions at the 301 Centre. Being able to go through worksheet after worksheet meant I became confident on what I was doing; before going to the 301 centre I wasn’t confident and often struggled with the worksheets.
Paraphrasing Session:
Maddy: Paraphrasing is the process of expressing someone else’s ideas or words in your own words. This session was useful for me on a management course as it is common practice in assignments to paraphrase theory from other academics. This session allowed me to understand where to use sources in my writing, identify different approaches to using sources, develop strategies for paraphrasing and integrate sources and academic literature into the structure of my writing.
After the session I felt much more confident to go and find accurate and reliable sources, and how to implement them into my writing. It allowed me to reference precisely and secure more marks on my assignments by following correct university methods and reducing plagiarism.
Online workshops:
Maddy: As well as specific sessions to book onto through the 301 service, you can also do online workshops. These are also online workshops that you can do at any point. Once you complete a 301 skills audit, it will show you which areas you need to focus on more. From this, online workshops will be available for you to do in your own time and help you improve on certain skills such as: critical writing, reading and note taking, exam technique, essay writing and developing academic arguments to name a few. These small workshops are useful to help when you have small periods of the day to fill and can massively help improve your skills and your university work.
What next?
Luke: My advice would be to book in a 1-1 session via muse, bring a worksheet/tutorial activity you want to go through and you’ll be surprised how much the 1-1 sessions help. Especially as we near exam season, anything you’re struggling with there’ll be able to help.