Do everything in advance - I did my history IA over junior year, my Bio and Physics IA over the summer, and my Math IA during Christmas break. I finished my first draft of the EE by the first day of senior year. This lets your supervisors really delve deep into your material and give you meaningful feedback to help you later edit it. Because I did everything so early, I wasn’t rushing to finish my IB coursework and I had more time to work on college applications and interview prep.
Pace yourself - this point follows the previous lines of thought. I knew people who wanted to chill for a night or two but then were left scrambling the next few days as they now had 6 hours of work to catch up on. For both years in the IB, I was able to go to sleep at 10 pm. It is not impossible. You just need to do at least an hour of work every night and work every weekend. Do not leave yourself with 3 days off and 4 days of anxious and mind-numbing hours of work.
Make study schedules - these saved me during mock exams and the May ones as well. Studying on the fly works fine if you have one or two tests in a week, but once it becomes one or two tests in a day for a while, it’s helpful to have designated times to study materials. However, you have to make sure you stick with them. I always started my studying at 9 or 10 because I knew realistically that at 8, my mind would not be awake enough to study.
Take notes on what the teacher says and writes - if your teacher doesn’t give you materials or notes, then you will most likely already be doing this. However, for some of my classes, the teachers gave us notes that were not always sufficient. Often times, the teacher would mention something offhandedly which came up later in the real exams. Make sure you pay attention and write down everything, even if it’s tedious. When you get home, you can organize your notes better.
Use the textbooks - In biology and physics, my teachers made their own notes and rarely used the textbooks. This may have been a good idea to help students understand the concepts in a different way, but often handicapped us for mock exams as not all of the textbooks were used in their notes. If you have access to IB textbooks, it’s worth it to skim through the pages and write your own notes on concepts you teachers may not have covered. The IB is notorious for testing on the tiniest of details.
Research, research, research - doing the IB means doing loads and loads of research, whether it be from the simplest essays to your long-drawn and hard-fought EE. You need to understand how to research. I’ll make another post about this but here’s my quick advice: use the footnotes. Not getting what you need from the source? Check the titles of the books or articles in their footnotes/bibliography. This gives you more research to work from and will lead to less frantic googling and more in depth work.
Pick IA and EE topic according to your interests - these essays will take a big chunk of your time. If you are not interested in them, they will be tedious, especially the extended essay. Finding IA and EE topics was probably my least favourite part of the IB. I was stressed out and could not find anything for the longest time, and that’s okay. I found my topic for my biology late in my junior year, but I was one of the first to finish - don’t be scared that the timelines will come to get you, because if you keep on track and finish in a timely manner you will be fine. The best way to finish earlier is to be interested in your essays.
And that’s all that I can think up right now on the top of my head! I will be adding a post about research soon because that was probably the most essential part of my high school journey and what was the most useful in my EE.
