When Ella Fitzgerald sings "summer time, and the living is easy", she clearly isn't singing about students who are preparing for summertime exams! But, with the summer exam period one week away, the SLC team is here to offer you some helpful tips and tricks. They may not make your exams feel easy, but hopefully they will make your whole exam experience a bit easier. 

Feeling anxious about writing your term papers this semester? You aren't alone! In fact, writing anxiety is experienced by writers across all genres and all stages of writing experience. This blog post explores the topic of writing anxiety and provides some practical suggestions for how to address the anxiety you may be experiencing. 

Note: this post focuses on "every day" writing anxiety and not clinical anxiety. If your anxiety is unmanageable, please get support from SFU Health and Counselling or from another health care professional. Your well-being matters! 

It's that time of semester when assignment deadlines can start to feel like they are piling up on you. And, it can be especially hard to get down to work when the sun is shining! 

Let the assignment calculator help you to break down your assignments into manageable steps. That's just good project management! 

Get your summer semester off on the right foot by learning how to read smarter, not harder (or longer)!

Graduate Writing Facilitator Jennesia Pedri has generously shared with us a Reading Guide that she created to support her own reading during her comprehensive exams for her doctoral studies in the School of Communications. As Jennesia explains, the guide aims to help you read more efficiently and effectively. It also aims to make itself obsolete: eventually you won’t need it because you’ll begin to automatically ask yourself these kinds of questions as you read.

The Student Learning Commons is scouting out new talent for our Writing and Learning Peer and English as Additional Language Peer programs. 

Both positions will allow you to develop transferable skills in the areas of client service, interpersonal skills, giving effective feedback, and cross-cultural communication, and will give you access to a professional reference as well as a private study/social space in the library.

We hope you will join our team! Apply now through http://myinvolvement.sfu.ca

I'm sure I don't have to mention that it is exam time! In this blog post, Donya Samadi --  PhD student in Educational Psychology and former Graduate Facilitator with the SLC -- shares how the concept of self-explanation can be applied to studying. 

Self-explanation, Donya explains, may be beneficial because information previously learned is recalled and integrated with new information to generate a self-explanation. In this way, self-explanation is a connection and elaboration to prior knowledge. When engaged in self-explanations, learners can develop new meaningful associations, and further understand the content they are studying. 

Part-two of Eric Cai's top tips for excelling in university classes that require math and problem-solving. 

Want to know more about Eric? Read his In Common welcome interview here. 

Many university classes require a lot of math and problem-solving. Eric Cai, the former SLC Peer and guest blogger who we introduced just before the holiday closure, shares his top tips on how to excel in these challenging courses in a two-part series.  

In Common welcomes former SLC Peer Eric Cai as a guest blogger. In his posts, he will focus on study and communication skills for students in math and science. Learn more about Eric in the following email interview.

By Daniel Chang

PhD candidate and SLC Graduate Writing Facilitator Daniel Chang offers some important reminders and tips to help take you through the end of the Fall 2018 academic term.