Friendly reminder during this stressful time of year that part of my CAS was making edits, my math IA was on the statistics of Doctor Who ratings, and my EE was on the 2011 David Tennant and Catherine Tate Much Ado production and I am currently in college studying architecture and not putting most any of the course material to use, you'll be just fine.
The methodology of the IBDP is knowledge for knowledge's sake, and many times it does not feel so in practice. To me, it felt bothersome and repetitive, yet in a way that had me feel as if I knew nothing at all but was somehow in a constant loop. And yet, when I speak to my old classmates I find that I am one of the only who looks back at those years with genuine fondness and a wish for it to be a universal experience.
It's not about academic growth (at least not primarily and not in the way that, in my experience, we have been taught to think of it as). The IB is about internal and external growth in your perspective. It's about broadening your mind and challenging yourself and being challenged by the world for the sake of being alive. It's difficult, and it hurts, and, for me, a great big deal of it was failure, but I think that's why I came out of it with such a sense of fulfillment.
Something most people who are as privileged as us to not worry about searching for our own education and live in constant, relative, commodity don't learn until much later in life is that freedom is nothing without utter fulfillment and constant growth, in all parts of yourself.
But also, and it's a big also, there is a major difference between being challenged by your academics and the world than being challenged by your mentors, teachers, and other's actions. Like in most institutions, unfortunately, you will also learn that sometimes what you think is rational pushback or uncooperation from a teacher is how it is supposed to be, when in reality, they are just a bad teacher. It is important to trust yourself and to notice when something is weighing on you because it is difficult or because doing it makes you feel minute and stuck. Education should not make you feel smaller than yourself, it should make you feel small, yes, but, in relation to the world around you, and bigger as you grow and learn to take hold of it.
Knowledge and its acquisition should make you feel powerful, stronger than you were before, and yearning to understand more. That is what you need to remember when you feel small and stuck and pushed to fit some idea of who you are not, and you must then ask yourself how it is that you are growing, or how it is you are not, and use that as a tool to form strategies that defend your inner peace and bolster you to being amused and fulfilled by your work.
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