Academic Skills is here to help you study better. Our services are designed to help you analyze your strengths and your struggles to determine your best study plan for any course. Use our resources to build a strong foundation of intentional tactics and strategies to approach classes with more confidence. All experience levels are welcome!
Services Offered
Appointments
are 30-minute individual consultations to help you troubleshoot your experience around specific topics.
Workshops
are 90-minute one-off small group discussions to develop strategies around specific learning topics.
Self-Guided Workshops
are videos and activities accessible any time to guide problem-solving.
Online Resources
are worksheets that provide study skill guidance.
Subjects/topics
Make a Study Plan
Make and revisit your study decisions thoughtfully and intentionally to keep your cool while you build your brain.
- Participate in a guided, strategic syllabus/course communications analysis.
- Share, learn and choose among options for weekly learning activities.
- Share, learn and choose among options for distributed review.
Time Management
Keep the quarter enriching, but not exhausting, by finding your own comfortable rhythm for work and play.
- Participate in a guided analysis of your time needs, including for rest and recreation.
- Experiment with time blocking, due-diligence time management, and listing.
- Try out time-awareness lists and time-awareness calendars.
Fighting Procrastination
The habit of procrastination probably will not go away on its own.
- Participate in a guided procrastination-self-analysis.
- Share, learn, and choose from strategies like artificial deadlines and gamification.
- Build and get feedback on your procrastination-resistance plan.
Focus
See if you can make it easier for your cognitive machinery to show up and do its job in spite of its own agenda.
- Participate in a guided distraction-self-analysis.
- Share, learn, and choose from such tactics as distraction delay, cueing, and mirroring.
- Build and get feedback on a focus plan that targets your most distraction-vulnerable tasks.
Test Readiness
When you’re really ready, taking a test can be no big deal, just another day in class.
- Discuss your evaluations of course material. How can you tell if you have missed anything?
- Troubleshoot your ideas about timing. When should you review? Why?
- Develop the strategy of your review by considering topics to revisit and review activities.
Reading Efficiency
Stop feeling bogged down by all those words by handling them purposefully.
- Participate in a guided course-communications analysis to figure out why you are reading.
- Practice reading by layers to fulfill course purposes efficiently.
- Share, learn, and create your own note-taking protocols that set up distributed review.
Learning from Lecture
Being able to learn well from lecture saves students a lot of time.
- Practice noticing and leveraging the topic-sub-topic lecture form.
- Participate in a guided lecture review and comprehension audit.
- Share, learn about, and choose methods for building distributed-review from lecture content.
- Participate in a guided preview of your next lectures.
Confronting Confusion
Be dazzled by your own mind’s capacity to get itself out of trouble if you give it a chance.
- Try out the identify-isolate-interrogate-investigate system to clear the concept fog.
- Share, learn, and select methods for illumination, including talking, writing, and drawing.
- Rehearse asking questions with confidence and specificity.
Academic Confidence
A lot of you do not appreciate your excellent minds as much as you should.
- Participate in a guided course-felt-response-analysis to pinpoint the triggers for self-doubt.
- Interrogate your self-doubts for the presence of fixed ideas of the mind.
- Share, learn, and try out confidence-builders such as reasonable goal setting and visualization.
Motivation
Get in touch with what you want so you can properly seize the opportunities around you.
- Take a motivation inventory to consider your different motivational styles.
- Explore your emerging life-vision with the Master Student Goal-Setting Exercise.
- Share, learn, and select methods for bending your classes to your will.