It’s that time of year again: juniors are beginning to rack their brains in search of a topic to write the dreaded Extended Essay. The Extended Essay is a 4,000-word paper that IBDP students will write starting in their junior year. With a free range of topics from history to business management, it can be hard to know where to start. Where better to receive guidance from than seniors who have survived this scarring endeavor themselves? Read below as seniors share their top tips for how to succeed when writing an Extended Essay.
- Pick something you’re interested in. Students will spend hours picking apart their chosen topic. This may be an obvious tip, but to make this process the slightest bit more interesting, students should pick a subject that they do well in at school and pick a topic under that umbrella that they’re curious about. This will make the work a little more engaging and a little less grueling. “I chose literature for my Extended Essay and wrote it on ‘Ready Player One,’ my favorite book,” said senior Knox Wade. “I was surprised by how much I had to say about it. The essay practically wrote itself!”
- Develop time management skills. One of the most universal issues among students is procrastination. This struggle can be exacerbated when given an assignment with such a large window of time allowed for completion. Furthermore, it can be difficult to determine how much time to spend on specific parts of the assignment. A way to tackle this issue is to follow the deadlines given in your IB Theory of Knowledge class. “I definitely had a hard time writing my EE because I made the mistake of procrastinating it to the week it was due. During that week, I probably got about eight hours of sleep altogether,” said senior Natasha Havey. “I also should have spent less time trying to write my intro paragraph before the rest of my paper, which ended up taking a lot of my precious time I had to write the paper.”
- Relax! Remember that it’s just a research paper and not the end of the world. Sometimes there can be so much pressure placed on students that tasks can seem more daunting than they actually are. Seniors testify that this is one of the less difficult feats involved with the IB program. “I thought the Extended Essay was hard until I met the Internal Assessment,” said senior Xaden Benson.
- Put in the work early on to make life easier later. In the planning stages of the Extended Essay, students will be asked to find several sources to cite throughout their work and analyze these sources to determine how they can be utilized more effectively. With efficient analysis, it will be easier to implement these sources into the essay and maximize their contribution. “If I was to be able to do it all over again, I would definitely work harder on my source analyses, because those ended up being very helpful when I did them correctly,” said Havey.
In the end, the Extended Essay is just one of many papers and projects IBDP students will encounter during their two years in the DP pathway. Students also have plenty of help and guidance available to them from teachers, advisors, and seniors. To summarize the top tips – work efficiently and choose a topic you have some investment in, but also remember that it is one of many papers to come.
