How the IB helped to prepare me for university

By a student in the second year of their English degree

Even after as little as two years away, school already seems a very long time ago. What has continued to resonate at university however, are some of the skills the IB undoubtedly provided me with. During the first two years of my degree I have been expected to produce regular essays, be able to justify points of view within tutorials, take effective notes from lectures, and spend a lot of time working on my own. It is not the case that disciplined time management would not have been engrained from following the A-level system, but the IB especially, if subconsciously at the time, prepares its students for university by teaching them to take more responsibility for their own learning, and the ability to implement this effectively in tertiary education. Every week, for example, can be seen as writing an extended essay: for this the experience of spending time in the school library towards the end of the sixth form exploring a topic of personal interest proves invaluable on arrival at university. Just as the operation of the IB is grounded in interacting with and critically absorbing the points of view of others, the university tutorial and seminar system also relies on the ability to talk and reason effectively. This can be seen to stem principally from the practice of discussion in theory of knowledge. Certainly within the context of an English degree, being taught how to talk about literature for oral assessments can easily be seen to convert into at least attempting to hold one’s own in a tutorial. Not least, the IB foreshadows university study by engendering the healthy expectation of working hard (although this is not always kept to!).