Former IB students did your IB experience give you any advantages at University?

E.g. essay writing, managing deadlines etc?

More than anything else, it helped me for cramming. I know a lot of people who simply think, "Oh ****, I'm not going to have time," but I've gotten incredibly good at measuring and apportioning the time needed to study for exams. At least for me, university is "less" intense, in the sense that it's not all do-or-die in university, the professors (at least in the humanities) tend to know the students and you can work with them if you have any weaknesses or are having difficulties (e.g. meet with them regarding papers).

Besides that, and possibly some time management, not much I'd say. Even though I got 7s on my psychology and english papers, I wasn't a strong writer until coming to Brown.

Reply 2

blindpet

I would say that the IB gives you one very important thing that you must have if you are to be successful there: critical thinking skills. At least in psychology, the professors do not care if you can regurgitate facts, they want you to have an opinion and argue your point (point of TOK) and evaluate knowledge and evidence. This has been the most important skill I got from IB and has meant that I can focus on evaluating knowledge instead of just memorizing which makes it easier to remember everything for me at least. Time management you get as well.

Reply 3

AnonymousPenguin

Not really. It turns out I know more maths than most, but it's not really something that matters much in medicine.

Reply 4

username460525

Original post by Rosalind

I am a current IB student so I know this thread isn't directly aimed at me, but I feel that TOK helped me a lot in my Cambridge interview and so would be helpful for study in similar institutions

I want to study language, so the main questions I were asked were about the importance of language, 'what is language', can you 'define language', does it 'give you another soul to have another language' etc... These are all things we touch on in TOK but don't assess in language lessons.

this. exactly this. I also applied and was interviewed a few weeks ago for languages at Cambridge, and the only reason I felt quite secure was because of TOK. It completely changes the way you think, and talk about things. Questions that would have terrified me a few years ago ("have we, as a human race, become 'better' over time?") were absolutely fine because of TOK. My whole ab initio Russian interview was basically on the 'nature of history' - exactly what we did in TOK just a few weeks before.

And, although I'm not at Uni yet, my friends that are (even Oxbridge) say that the work is so much more manageable, the stress levels are far lower and time management is fine!