University Papers

Joie Lin - Waikato University  Unistart Paper Semester A 

This year I took the paper WRITE-100 (Writing for Academic Success) through the University of Waikato UniStart programme, in the HUB. The paper focused on academic literacy skills, covering general academic communication and research skills and applying this to different areas of study. It was done over Semester A, starting a few weeks into February and finishing in June. The paper consisted of a weekly lecture (which I watched online) followed by activities to support the learning content from the lecture. The lecturer presented the content and provided feedback in a way that was very helpful and easy to understand. There were a total of four online quizzes, which were 20% of the overall grade, and three assignments (the Writing Portfolio, Literature Critique and Final Essay/Report), which were 80% of the overall grade. 

I generally spent about two hours per week on the paper, but more time during the weeks that we had one of the assignments due. The workload therefore was not very intense and keeping all the due dates in mind meant that I could very easily work around other commitments to keep myself organised.

Next year I am looking at potentially studying health sciences at university so even though the paper was not directly related to this, the content was still really useful - especially the learning about effective researching, and APA referencing - as these are very important foundational skills and transferable across almost any other subject. I would really recommend this paper to anyone who would like to develop their academic writing skills and take a paper that is a bit more general. Overall, taking this university paper was really beneficial as it allowed me to get a feel for how teaching works at university without a big workload, as well as practise self-managing my learning ahead of next year.