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 Memor...

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....

You might have been seeing a few mentions of EYP floating around this website, popping up randomly whenever I mention a recent trip I went on or something. Well, in this post I will be telling you why you, as a European, should be joining EYP (the European Youth Parliament)! It's an incredible volunteer-run organisation that deserves much more attention than it gets. If I'm being completely honest, you won't leave EYP without having extra knowledge: you will create friendships that will last for a lifetime (cheesy, I know), learn about politics, current affairs and (most importantly) yourself. So, what exactly are the benefits of joining EYP? 1. You learn about current affairs and collaboration The European Youth Parliament, as the name suggests, is a simulation of what the European Parliament actually does when dealing with different issues within the EU. This makes it a super fascinating experience where you can actually get super in-depth kno...

CREATIVITY Regular activities 1. Makeup When finding things I could do for creativity, I was told by teachers that I could do anything from writing to painting and drawing. While I already did plenty of these things before the IB started, I instantly knew that doing those same things during the IB would be a struggle, since I only found time to draw, paint or write on rare occasions. I began to think of things I did during my day-to-day life that I could in theory try to squeeze in as something similar to those types of activities. When IB1 started, I remember joking to someone about makeup as an activity similar to 'painting your face' and then it hit me... maybe I could do makeup for CAS hours, since that was something that I already was doing every single day! Sure enough, I showed my CAS supervisor a few examples of me doing 'wilder' and more experimental makeup and she loved the idea. She even said that makeup wasn't very different from pa...

Everyone has expectations when they join the IB, but how many are just myths and don’t actually reflect the reality? While the IB is known as a hard programme for students, this belief can be completely blown out of proportion in a variety of ways, including when it comes to the EE (Extended Essay), CAS (Creativity, Activity, Service) and the students around them. Today, I’ll talk about some of the expectations I had (and I’m sure the others around me had as well) when starting the IB, and the reality of those expectations. Expectation 1: Everyone in the IB is smarter than I am. Some people (including myself) thought that once I would enter an IB school, I would be surrounded with some of the smartest students in the country and would struggle hugely to keep up with them. I felt like the difficulty of the entrance exams would also equate to how smart the people in my class would end up being and, as you might already know, I felt the Ressu exam was the most diffi...