A Guide to the IB

IB1 is the big year of change. Your teacher starts loading on the Internal Assessments (IAs), expects you to have an idea for you Extended Essay (EE), you should start and finish your TOK Oral Presentation, you have Written Assignments due, and finally you start having your Individual Oral Commentaries for your language subjects! It's definitely a stressful workload to start off with, and most students are left unprepared. Even then, I still found IB1 to be my most enjoyable year in high school, since I still had the opportunity to travel all over Europe ( check out this link to find out how EYP helped me do this! ) and start working part-time, while balancing my studies. Because of all of this, I'd say my experience in IB1 was also the most mixed year ever, with lots of highs and lots of lows. To make the process of you going to IB1 easier, today I'll be answering the essential question: what should you expect when you go to IB1?  Initial EE Planning i

TOK is full of super specific words and concepts that take a long time to actually even know what they mean, let alone remember them by heart. Moreover, many websites are useful in giving you all of the terms covered in TOK, but personally I only found a small fraction of them actually useful and used in the assessment components. So, I compiled a list of all the absolutely necessary  TOK terminology that you should know to ace your TOK Presentation and TOK Essay  so you don't need to sift through hundreds of terms and get overwhelmed by complicated definitions. PS. To find specific terms and sift through stuff you already know, press Control+F (Windows) or Command+F (Mac). Way of Knowing (WOK) A Way of Knowing : the method  a person uses to understand how or why something happens. They can all be used as independent methods to perceive the world. There are 8 WOKs: Language, Sense perception, Emotion, Reason, Imagination, Faith, Intuition and Memory. Languag

The IB can be a treacherous place for newcomers from middle school, but what exactly is different? Today, I'll be talking about some of the many ways in which studying in the IB is a bit different from middle school! How different is the workload? The general consensus on the IB workload is that it's barely tolerable and is super difficult to get through: as soon as you get home from studying at school, you study at home until you sleep and you have NO time for extracurriculars or socialisation. Well, I do have to admit that the longer you're in the IB, the more work you have. My middle school experience: While in middle school, I didn't get that much homework (at most maybe an hour per night worth of work if I really wanted to dedicate myself to getting perfect marks). During 7th grade, I had an incredibly average GPA of around 8.4 according to the Finnish grading system out of 10: not terrible, but definitely not even close to the best GPA in class.

Across the internet, there are thousands of different resources, materials, and tutors at your disposal. But, as I'm sure many IB students come to realise, it's pretty hard to find links that are actually useful. Instead, there are offers for paid tutors, courses and books which cost quite a bit. In this article, though,  here are all the links you need for getting all the help you need in perfecting your IB scores. This includes hundreds of handwritten notes from full-scoring students, links to WhatsApp groups to ask your fellow peers how to do different questions, and some of the best online IB teachers in their field. Now, the IB world is your oyster! :) If you haven't enrolled in an IB school (especially in Finland), here are the most important links to get you started: If you haven't joined the IB, fret not: here you can find the links to Finnish schools which offer the IB programme. Browse through all the different locations that IB schools are ava

So, you're thinking of applying to the IB in Finland and you have questions about the entrance exams? Look no further! Today, I will be delving into frequently asked questions about applying to the IB, the entrance exams you have to do and how to prepare. How do I apply to an IB High School? When you’re in 8th grade of lower secondary school, you may need to start thinking about options of continuing to upper secondary schools. You have only 5 schools you can apply to, and you should pay a lot of attention to what order you put them in when submitting your application in 9th grade. For example, in the table above, you can see that the school I wanted to get into most was the IB Programmes in Ressun Lukio, followed by Helsingin Suomalainen Yhteiskoulu (SYK), Etelä-Tapiolan Lukio (Etis), Mattlidens and Tikkurilan Lukio. Thus, my least preferred option was Tikkurila.  As for how the point scoring system works, as stated by the Ressun Lukio website: ‘Students can