A Wee Blether About...The Academic Skills Team 2026-27

Yeah, so I think academic skills can sound quite formal or even intimidating sometimes, but our goal is really just to help you develop your writing and anything that's related to your assessments and your knowledge and your quality of work across your student journey.

So as you progress throughout the levels, the expectations might feel like they're getting a bit higher.

And we're here to support you as you navigate that.

So there's a few different ways that we do that.

The kind of bread and butter, we always say that, the bread and butter of what we do, although we do lots of stuff, but what you might see us in the most, if you seek them out, are one-to-one appointments.

So these are appointments that are either on campus, online via Microsoft Teams,

or sometimes

via email feedback, especially if you already had an appointment with us, email feedback could be good.

And that is about 30 minutes typically where you might come to us with assessment guidance or an assessment that you started to draft or perhaps a resubmission that you're working on and ask a few questions.

Maybe you're not sure if your writing style is academic, Maybe you're not sure about your references, which always feels like learning another language.

Maybe you have a presentation and you're a bit nervous about that.

Whatever it might be, we can chat you through that and an academic skills appointment kind of no matter the format there.

You also

might see us in embedded sessions.

This is just a fancy name for when we take over some of your lecture time, some of your class time.

So we might coordinate with one of your lectures and talk about something related to an assessment you have coming up.

So if you have a report that you're writing, again, if you have some sort of presentation that you're working on, maybe it's your first ever presentation.

academic assessment academic essay that you need to submit and you want some support on how to write at university how to structure things like that we might then come in for 45 minutes or an hour of your lecture and talk you through um how you might approach that assessment at university

great and as you can hear there are quite a few um you know different kinds of appointments that we offer as well.

So one-to-one, it can be in person, it can be online.

We also do email appointments.

So with an email appointment, you don't necessarily need to attend.

You book the slot and then we can give you a bit of feedback on maybe up to about three pages of your work.

And that's proved quite popular, certainly over the past year or so.

You'll also see us around campus.