Help with Deciding EE Topic

[Neeliegya]

I am in grade 11 and currently trying to choose a EE topic. There are more than one general area that I am interested in, but I'm really not sure how things would work out... Here are some topics I gathered (all not narrowed down):

 

- World religion: reincarnation, or maybe astrology

- Psychology: escapism through imagination/ fantasizing

- Group 1 Comparison of Literature between Two Languages: Chinese literature and English (I have done quite a bit of study on Chinese poetry before)

- Something about Japanese culture, perhaps even anime, whichever category this would fit in

- Something about food and a specific culture

 

So... I really don't know what to do now, or what makes a good topic to explore and write an essay on. I know that some of these topics are really bad...My areas of interest are generally things that involve analysing and thinking more rather than something really scientific, and I like studying language, literature, culture, philosophy, and stuff like that. I need some advice!

[ibprincess]

To get a good topic, start with which subject you want to do. Chose this because you're interested and you genuinely want to explore something in the reach of that subject that you don't have the opportunity to study in the syllabus. It's best if you study this subject obviously, but that's not mandatory. When you have a subject, go and look at past essays in that subject. See what sort of topics/questions/headings/subheadings/arguments they used. Also speak to the teacher that teaches the subject so you can see if your topic is doable.

 

 

- Something about Japanese culture, perhaps even anime, whichever category this would fit in

- Something about food and a specific culture

If you do the first one, I would imagine you would do it for language B so it would have to be in Japanese, or you could do it for anthropology maybe. The second one is the broadest topic you could come up with. Even if you could fit this into one of your subjects, you will not be able to condense everything you want to say into 4000 words. Both of those topics are bad i don't know how else to say it.

 

Do you study world religion? psych? both? neither? Generally Group 3 subject EE's are really difficult to do well in if you don't take the subject so that's something to think about. You also need to realise you can't just have reincarnation as you topic and then just throw 4000 words of information about reincarnation into your essay. You need a question that will help you reach a conclusion so at the moment it looks like all your topics are incredibly wide. That's not a horrible thing though-- find out what interests you, talk to your (potential) supervisor about the topic and where the topic can go then decide if it's right for you. 

 

Your group 1 topic sounds interesting  (still broad) but really challenging. For this topic, I would suggest probably looking at how the same news story is reported in Chinese and English but I'm not sure if this still counts for Group 1. You might need a supervisor who can read both Chinese and English so that can be more or less possible depending on what teachers are at your school.

[Neeliegya]

Thank you. And yes, I do know that all of these topics are way too broad for an essay (I would probably just have made a decision quickly if I do have narrower topics...) I do take Psychology, but I'm starting to doubt writing an essay on it now, as it involves a bit too much scientific research to me. As for the religion and cultural parts... I involved those options because they were recommended to me by a supervisor, but I'm just not too sure which specific subject I should choose if I were to research it for two years. And I don't think any teacher in the school understands Chinese...Ah, life is hard!

Thanks for the advice though.