Hi, and welcome to my website!

My name is Peter Levin. I have been a specialist study-skills adviser to undergraduate and postgraduate students at the London School of Economics (LSE), and I am the author of a series of books on study skills, the Student-Friendly Guides, published by Open University Press.

I am retired now, but at the LSE I was for many years a full-time academic in the Department of Social Policy. I have been departmental tutor and chair of examination boards as well as individual tutor to hundreds of students, so I know something about the demands that are made of students. When I was a study-skills adviser, between 250 and 300 students a year came to see me, mostly undergraduates or master’s students, international as well as from the UK. They came with a wide range of issues. Many were to do with writing essays and dissertations, or preparing for exams, but behind these lay deeper questions about what was expected of them and how to make best use of their time.

The students whom I met taught me that the world of the university looks very different from a student’s viewpoint than it does from an academic’s. While writing the Student-Friendly Guides and the pages on this website, I have tried to keep this lesson firmly in mind.