Ebbinghaus, Machiavelli and Me: Tips for new coming IB students

Dear up-and-coming IB students, congratulations. You’ve reached a milestone. Once you’re 45 and bitter and looking at the sports car catalogue to cater to your budding midlife crisis, this is the time of your life you’ll be reminiscing back to. Ah, your penultimate years of high school…

…At least that’s what the others tell me. I am only two years older than you and not actually that much more qualified to talk about life. But having survived it (for now), I am more than qualified to talk about the IB, so let’s get started.

I’ll split this into three parts. As someone taking primarily essay-based subjects for my HLs, three is the only number I know.

1. Tips you’re not going to listen to

2. Tips you might listen to

3. Words of affirmation and encouragement

Tips you’re not going to listen to

Your teachers are going tell you to follow these; I am about to tell you to follow these; you will tell yourself you’ll follow these, until you inevitably don’t - so I’ll make this quick

1. Actually pay attention in class, (at least) try to understand the content, and do your homework. Trying to cram the night before a unit test rarely works.

2. Try to get at least seven hours of sleep each night

3. Don’t procrastinate (lol)

4. Do your EE over the summer

5. Do your university essays / personal statements over the summer

6. Do your summer homework over the summer

7. Do everything you conceivably can over the summer (You die a little death every second of senior year)

8. Meet deadlines

Right, formalities over, let’s get to the real thing.

Tips you might listen to

1. Find study and revision techniques that work for you, and they may differ across subjects.

Active recall, Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve, Flashcards: these are all deities the average IB student and their teachers worship. But much like real deities, it doesn’t actually do much to just call on their names. The only way you can find what works for you is to try different things and experiment. Flashcards may help you remember information in one subject or one aspect of one subject (eg. dates in history) but not others (eg. different historiographical schools of thought). Would you perhaps prefer to have all the information on a big A3 page so you can see ‘the bigger picture'? Maybe you study best by talking to a friend about the content, going through the gaps in your knowledge for biology?

These are all questions you need to figure out for yourself - and you can only do so by paying attention to what works and what doesn’t. Searching up ‘revision tips’ on YouTube will provide you with a plethora of different options and methods to experiment with. It may be annoying to keep having to mix things up, but it’s best you do this during your first year, trust me.

2. Don't become bitter

All IB students will have their bouts of viciousness. When you’re being hounded for those missing CAS reflections - the ones you make up anyway. When you supposedly “had three weeks to do the task” - the task that was club-sandwiched between your three million other far more urgent tasks. When someone dares to question your organisation skills…

Brings out the worst in us all. Six million years of evolution chucked out the window. And yet it's perfectly permissible. You’re allowed to cry, scream, moan, mope, and lament the very creation of the universe at that very moment. Dear little one, the IB is far from training for martyrdom. But it’s not sustainable to be in that state perpetually. Make sure you find healthy coping mechanisms early on, because the alternative would be unhealthy coping mechanisms - and that's where things really go wrong…

Some suggestions collated from current IB students include

• Jogging

• Writing notes of encouragement to yourself (I personally find adding obscenities help)

• Online shopping

• FaceTiming friends to rant

• Writing vitriolic articles against the IB in the school newspaper that no one reads anyway under the guise of offering ‘Tips’

• Netflix

3. Find the small things you like about the IB and hold on to those for dear life.

To follow tip number two, it is fundamentally against human nature to like five or six different subjects and five or six wildly different subject areas. And of course, pile onto that your TOK, CAS, and EE. Having to write a maths IA at two am in the morning when you know for a fact that the second you walk out of your final exam, all the maths you’ve ever learned in your life is going to leave you like a deflating balloon, is a special type of torture. It is in moments like this that you need to remind yourself there are things you like about the IB (eg. The superiority complex), and that you are working towards something - hopefully getting into a university. (If this is for some reason not your ultimate goal, stop reading and unenroll yourself from this ungodly course this very minute and fly, fly away. Be free!)

4. You’re allowed to be a young person with a complicated life.

You’re going to have ups and downs that inevitably will affect your performance. I’ve been quite lucky in this regard but I do have friends with unsupportive if not downright harmful family environments. Just because your unsupportive parents can cough up a sack of money to be sent to the IBO in Geneva, it doesn’t mean that they will also be able to support you emotionally through the next two years. You’re allowed to feel grateful for the former and not the latter. Everyone’s IB journey (cringe, I know) will be different - and that’s okay.

The only thing I would say is this: maintain a support network. That can be your family, or your friends, school counsellors or even a combination (preferably this final once since the cumulative effects of all your IB-inspired diatribes will likely be too much for any one person)

5. Make friends with your teachers.

In an ideal world, everyone will be treated fairly. Global hunger will have been eradicated, you won’t have to deal with god awful Boomer jokes at eight in the morning, and most importantly, teachers will have no favourites. You don’t live there. Here, school atmospheres fostered by the IB programme are much more like 16th century Florence. And in 16th century Florence, Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli thrived.

It may not have been cool in middle school or even junior and sophomore year to be the teacher's pet, but personal morality has no place for getting 40+ IB points and staying sane. Teachers are going to define your IB experience. You'll spend hours upon hours with them. Your performance in the IB will depend on their quality of teaching. The number of ‘ugh' sounds they make when you ask for yet another extension will depend on your established relationship. It will make both your academic and social existence just that bit more bearable for them to not have a voodoo doll of you in the second drawer.

For example, below is a student-teacher interaction you might find in the lunch queue, circa November senior year.

You: “Oh, are you having the Salad?"

Teacher: “No, I'm not. And if you'd only paid attention during class the other day, you would have heard that completely irrelevant anecdote I told about how I once had a dodgy salad just before I went on a kayak to go fly-fishing and - by the way, where is your IA? It was due last week...”

No one wants that. However, with a little Machiavellian resolve to seem interested in their deadly boring interests, you can obtain an outcome such as this:

You: “Oh, are you having the Salad?”

Teacher: “No, I'm not -”

You: “Oh, is it to do with that time when you went fly-fishing? You know I love to go fly-fishing (you don’t). It's so zen, sends you back to the good ol' days before these pesky tik tok things started mind-controlling kids…”

Teacher: “Oh Christ, don't get me started -”

You: “Oh, and can I have a 5th extension for my IA?”

Teacher: “Sure, whatever, as I was saying, the state of the youth nowadays…”

Much better.

Words of affirmation and encouragement

Well, what could I say that would make it easier? Nothing, really. However, what I will say is this: it’ll all work out in the end. You'll get into university, which likely is not going to be much easier workload-wise, and the preparation you will have had will serve you well, regardless of where you go or what you do. The IB, thankfully, is also very prestigious. Once you're done, you’ll be joining a community of young, intelligent, and ambitious people who have all made it out alive, and are now better off for the work they had put in (we don't talk about Kim Jong Un). It will be quite an experience, but if you do it right, you can make a success of it, I'm sure.