Extended Essay advice (for all my unfortunate IB fellows)
If just the title of this post gave you an anxiety attack, trust me, I understand you. The Extended Essay is such a big, long-term, daunting project, yet we feel like we’re given such little time to find a topic to write about, plan it, research and get to writing it. Getting started is so hard because we know how much time and hard work it’s going to demand.
I’m currently in the research phase, my topic being the impact of economic context in America on the effectiveness in dealing with the Great Depression- a History essay with a flavor of Economics, meaning lots, and lots, and lots of research and understanding extremely difficult concept to wrap my head around.
Since it is likely that your topic, too, will be so complicated, and that you won’t understand something right away while researching, here’s a few tips that are really helping me save time and headaches.
1) Once you have picked your topic and research question, get a general understanding of it by finding EASY sources. I’m talking about a YouTube video, a summary, a documentary, anything that’s going to help you ACTUALLY know what’s going on. This doesn’t mean you have to understand everything about it and already answer the research question- it just means you know which direction you’re going towards, what your topic comprises, and exactly what research you’re going to have to do to find an answer.
2) Then, start planning. Your plan has to be extremely detailed and it should include both a plan of action with which you’re going to approach the research AND the structure of your essay. Find suitable academic sources (I use Jstor) and keep in mind they might change. Plan to research what you still don’t know- for example, I planned to find out and break down each of President Hoover and President Roosevelt’s policies, to find out how context influenced them, and to compare their effectiveness, once I understood that the economic context had an effect on the measures taken to deal with the Great Depression. As for the structure, I planned to have an introduction on the importance of the topic, a general context, how context affected each of Hoover’s policies, how context affected each of Roosevelt’s policies, a comparison and a conclusion.
3) If scheduling works for you, go ahead and plan when you’re going to get that research and writing done. It’s pretty useless to me, especially cause I had to do it over the summer, so I didn’t even bother- however, if you’re doing this during the school year, scheduling an allocated time for Extended Essay work would probably be useful to make sure you don’t leave it all until the last minute.
4) Now, the tip I actually wanted to give you. While you are researching, you might find yourself not understanding half of the information you’re given- that’s totally okay. The EE is meant to be tough, and to teach you how to research using proper resources to a University level standard. While you are summarizing the information, write down next to your summary QUESTIONS you have about it. Then, next to the questions, write down where you think you might find the answer- use your sources. This will help you to A. avoid panicking and B. proceed with order in such a difficult process of learning. Also, this way you can split up the work further and make it more manageable (summarizing, answering questions, making it all fit within your research focus).
If you do this for every step of your research you should feel confident about your knowledge and actually understand what you’re writing about.
I hope this helps, let me know if you guys want my advice on how to pick a topic and formulate the right research question, and I will keep posting as I find out about more strategies that help me in my Extended Essay process!!💜
