Benefits of Hard-Work in Studying

Reading
History is a subject which requires students to work independently a great deal of the time, and to do a lot of reading. As such, it is advisable to develop efficient study skills, in order to ensure that you are well prepared for classes and essays, and ultimately exams.
Reading skills
The volume of reading that you will be required to do means that it is important to be able to develop skills to enable you to acquire information and assess arguments fairly quickly.
Successful students will be able to identify the most relevant passages, sections and chapters within the articles and books they read, not least through judicious use of contents pages and indexes, and to recognise that not every item on a given reading list will need to be read in its entirety, or read with the same level of intensity throughout. Good writers will guide readers through their work, and their approach, along with the main points of their argument, ought to be discernible fairly quickly.
Note taking
Successful students will also be those who are able to develop efficient note taking skills.
The key is to take neither too many nor too few notes, and to ensure that these notes are clear, accurate, and logically organised. Ensure that your notes record thoroughly the details regarding the source from which they are taken, in terms of the author, title, date, and so on, as well as in terms of page numbers. This will guarantee that you will be able to footnote correctly (see below), and save a great deal of time if you find it necessary to revisit particular sources for clarification and further elucidation. It will also serve to protect you from unintentional plagiarism (see below), particularly if you ensure that your notes indicate very clearly when you have quoted directly from a given author.
Library resources
Given the pressure on library resources, students need to persevere in order to obtain the required readings for seminars and essays, but this process is made a great deal easier by the wealth of resources at your disposal, beyond the reading rooms in UCL library.
UCL library should obviously be your first port of call, given its proximity, and that every effort is made to ensure that it contains the most relevant material for your studies. If books are on loan, remember that they can be recalled. If there is particularly high demand for certain items, your tutor ought to be able to have the loan period changed, although only when the book is actually in the library, and not already on loan.
In addition to the books on the shelves, however, certain book chapters (in photocopy), and certain particularly popular books, have been placed by tutors on what is called the ‘teaching collection’. These items should be marked on reading lists with an alphanumeric code (e.g.
TC1362), or with the term ‘issue desk’, and can be obtained for a short period from the issue desk, for use in the library, and for copying.
Equally valuable is the possibility of using many other libraries in the vicinity of UCL.
These include:
 Senate House Library. The Library for the University of London, within a stone’s throw of UCL, and for which all undergraduates should automatically be registered. The library’s collections complement, rather than merely duplicate, those of UCL.
 School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) Library.
 Institute of Archaeology library.
 Institute of Historical Research (IHR). You may need a letter from your tutor in order to gain admission, but the advantage of this library is that books cannot be borrowed, and so can be assumed to be available.