No idea what category my topic is under? HELP

[Aryana.c97]

Okay so just recently I was able to decide on an EE topic but now I don’t know what category it falls under. My topic is: Why are young adults in this generation captivated by the paranormal romance genre? Now I know that the question itself is not strong enough and I need to reword it, but aside from that I have no clue what category it is under. Is it psychology, sociology or english? Another problem is… I did not take psychology or sociology in IB, so can I even choose that topic? PLEASE HELP!! Thanks 

[chybug]

    I think you could potentially choose either category depending on where you go with your analysis. I had a similar situation for my EE. I ended up writing my essay without any sort of "category" inhibiting myself. Then, once I finished, I talked to both my English teacher and the psychology teacher, and we all agreed my EE worked better under the English category and I tweaked it a bit to hit all the requirements. I don't know if this is something you're comfortable doing as it was rather daunting knowing that there were no actual guidelines for me to follow.

    As for your second question, you don't need to be taking a class in order to write an EE on that topic-- however, it sure helps!

[Emmi]

You are supposed to come up with a subject area before coming up with a topic, not the other way around. The IB is very very particular in what it wants for each subject, and guidelines vary from one subject to another. When you take an interdisciplinary topic (which is bad, it should fit 100% into one subject) and then try to find a subject for it, most of the time it doesn't work. You're either missing something, or not going into enough depth, or something else bad, which could give you a poor grade even if the essay was otherwise written extremely well.

 

You are allowed to write your EE on a subject you don't take. However, it isn't advised unless you're very confident you can do well in that subject by reading up on what's required and you have some sort of background in the subject outside of the IB (such as if you wanted to do a music EE and didn't take IB music, but you've played an instrument for several years and are knowledgeable about music theory and analysis) and you have a good supervisor. In general, people are usually discouraged from doing philosophy or psychology EEs unless they take the subject because the general ideas of psychology and philosophy that most people have are not IB philosophy or psychology, and they shoot themselves in the foot and do really poorly. Also, sociology is not an IB subject. There is social and cultural anthropology, but that is not sociology.

 

In addition, your topic is tooooo broad. You can't fit that into 4000 words, and you probably couldn't fit that into 10000 words. I know 4000 words seems like a lot, but it really isn't. You want a focused question that leads to analysis, which yours doesn't really seem like it would do.

 

Here's what you should do:

 

1. Go read the latest IB extended essay guide. It's located in the general downloads section here and should be available for you to download, or you can google and find it. You can skip the introductory IB learning profile stuff, just skip straight to the part where it talks about what's required of you and general notes about the EE.

 

2. Once you've read it, read it again. Then read it again.

 

3. Choose a subject from the guide that you'd like to do. Then read those subject's guidelines several times.

 

4. Choose a topic. You can start from somewhat broad, but eventually it should be narrow enough that you can write a concise, analytical essay, but not so narrow that you get to 2000 words and then run out of things to say. For example, my topic decision went history > european history > 20th century european history > early 20th century history > spanish civil war > to what extent did foreign intervention in the spanish civil war lead to the nationalists' victory.

 

Once you have a topic we'll be glad to give you feedback on it.