Improve Your Learning
Students everywhere are seldom reminded that university, as a system of education, is designed to force you to adapt. It isn't easy, because it isn't meant to be easy. It gives you more and harder work each year, until sooner or later -- by design -- the methods you started with don't work anymore, and you need to learn new ones. You need to learn how to learn more efficiently. The architects of this system knew that life will surprise you many times after graduation, and they knew too that the best preparation is this: being forced to find a new path to success when the familiar way fails. There is no single class to teach it, but you are invited to treat the material on this page as a syllabus of sorts. Train yourself to learn, better than you once did, and you will have learned the best thing university can teach: how to adapt to difficulty.
In-Person workshops
Format, citation, & reference -- these are the only places where your essay or writing assignment can be 100% correct. Points assigned to these parts of a paper are the easiest points to earn, by simply following the templates and patterns available to you. This 50-minute workshop with one of our Learning Skills Instructors will teach you the must-do and must-not-do rules of the MLA or APA styles, as well as how to access the guides and templates that make writing in either style easy and simple.
CLICK for dates, times, and registration
Literature reviews, properly done, are far more than simple gap-finding or knowledge-demonstrating exercises. They are arguments of their own, unique to your project, that cast the collected knowledge of a field into a shape that provides justification for your own research. This 50-minute workshop with one of our Learning Skills Instructors will teach you the best practices for planning, organizing, and writing a great literature review.
CLICK for dates, times, and registration
The following links lead to Moodle-based workshops on various skills and writing types. You can self-enroll in any or all of them, as you wish. Some of them will tell you things you already know, some of them will surprise you; take what serves your needs at the moment. If you want to have a more individual discussion on any of them, book an appointment with an ASC instructor at mywco.com/stfx.
The general skills
A simple name for the most important of our workshops: this set of modules will teach you about making an effective calendar to manage your own time, using notes (rather than making and forgetting them), and studying in a way that maximizes your ability to recall information.
This workshop is valuable beyond what most people expect. You don't always know what you don't know, but you are still responsible for it, if it includes any of the academic rules under which you are working. And these rules continue to command attention after graduation, as the basis of professional codes of conduct.
With a good study system, exams become much less worrisome. But if you still find it difficult to perform as well as you think you can on tests, there is likely some useful information for you here, from mindfulness and stress-reduction to strategies for particular question types.
The writing assignments
Everything you write at university will have some argument, some point to make. Doing it well is not something you are born knowing; it takes planning and effort and practice. This workshop takes you through the process of forming an argument and expressing it in writing.
The reports you write in business school, and in your future career, are a type of writing all their own; they are valuable tools to use well. Here you can learn about making your point in a way that convinces the audience to do what you want them to do.
You may be asked at times to write about your own experiences and thoughts. Far from a license to write anything you want, this means making your argument about yourself. It is an additional challenge, not a lesser one. This workshop will show you how a good writer integrates themselves into their academic writing.
Additional Resource Sheets:
Contact
Angus L. Macdonald Library
3080 Martha Drive
Antigonish NS B2G 2W5
Canada
