The University provides many resources, some you may not know about and haven't been covered by this guide elsewhere. Here are the ones that we find useful and feel would be useful to you throughout your studies. We will add more as we think of them!
If you need help with using any of these tools, or others, current members of the college can contact our Academic Services Librarian, Sarah Burton. She can sit down with you, virtually or in person, and give you an introduction or go through them in more depth.
For a list of study skills books, take a look at this online collection.
If you have any particular tools you use that you would like to recommend, let us know.
CamGuides introduce you to studying at Cambridge, familiarising you with the process and easing you into it all. But they are useful throughout your studies. Covering what to expect before and during your course, they are designed to demystify studying here and help you develop your academic skills. There are separate guides for undergraduate, master's and PhD students.
They have been created by librarians, in conjunction with students, academics and staff, covering a week in the life of an undergraduate student, as well as topics such as how to avoid plagiarism, software for academic use, managing your digital presence, wellbeing, digital tools and intellectual property.
Whether you need to do a simple poll, gather feedback, or build a complex survey for market research, Qualtrics does nearly all the hard work for you. It is free to all members of the University of Cambridge. Qualtrics provides you with much more than the free software you can find on the open web. It is intuitive and can be easily customised to create the exact survey you want.
Qualtrics offers:
You can create a Qualtrics account with UIS. Use your University credentials to create the account (your CRSid@cam.ac.uk email) and your University account password.
Visit the UIS help page on creating surveys in Qualtrics >
For further support, Sarah our Academic Services Librarian has been using it and teaching it for years, so you can contact her: s.burton@jesus.cam.ac.uk. She can even sit down with you 1-2-1 and take you through it. You can email the University's Qualtrics team at qualtrics@uis.cam.ac.uk. There is also excellent support on the Qualtrics website, with video tutorials and an extensive help section. Qualtrics’ Basic Overview Guides are an excellent starting point.
When searching for items online, you may find you need to log in or pay for items to access them. However, we may already subscribe to them as a University. Use this browser extension and it will tell you automatically if we already have access, either through Cambridge as an institution, or via Open Access. Here is a video to tell you more:
Unless otherwise stated, this work is licenced under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence by Jesus College Cambridge.
