Choosing an EE subject

[Guest]

Hello fellow IBers

So I'm doing HL Math, Physics, Economics and SL English Literature, French, Chemistry and need to choose an Extended Essay topic. I'm considering mostly Physics or Economics and was wondering if anybody who has done an extended essay in those subjects could tell me what their experience was like for that subject so I could make a better decision? I don't want to do Math because it seems too daunting and I've never written an extended Math piece of work before. 

Thanks!

Edited December 29, 2014 by Guest

[ibprincess]

I think an EE in physics is like a glorified extended lab report so if you feel confident with that it shouldn't be too hard for you

 

don't really know about economics

[twilight]

I did my EE in Physics. I think to do an EE in any of the sciences, you need to love lab work a lot because you have to design your experiments from scratch, which means lots of failures before you actually can conduct an experiment that allows you to collect data. Which also means that you need to be prepared to spend a lot of time in the lab. Some people say like for an English EE you just need to read the book and it's possible to write it in 2 weeks at home (sorry, not deriding or looking down on English EE, just brought it up as a contrast) but if you want to do well in a science EE, you really need to spend quite a lot of time. The work doesn't stop at collecting data though because it is also possible that the data you collected is totally unexpected. And then you have to conduct the experiment again to check that it is not an error, and then sit down and comb through hundreds of journals, wondering why you got an unexpected result. These are of course scenarios in case you decide to do a topic that is not very conventional. If you pick up conventional slightly modified textbook experiments, your work probably does not amount to as much.

[rainbowunicorn]

If you're planning on going into the sciences in university, doing a science EE will help a lot for when you're writing lab reports, and your EE will also help with your IA labs.

 

My IB coordinator also said that an EE in a subject you're going into in university will be good for university interviews in the UK but I don't know much about that..

 

I did my EE in bio, the experience should be similar to any science EE. I think it was a great experience to do a university level lab report and it was hard at some parts but I chose a topic I was interested in and it was fun to design an experiment and see the results. It was stressful too but overall I don't regret it.

 

I kind of wanted to do it in French too because there's so much you can do - you can look at culture or language or literature... the only thing is - you have to write it in French.