(Image from Gyeonggi Suwon International School)

Grade nine students, need help for your Personal Project in order to get the MYP certificate? Well following the tips given from the 10th-graders will most definitely help you succeed. 

The Personal Project is a project that every 10th-grader in the Middle Year Programme must complete. The main goal of the Personal Project is to help the students research and find a topic that they are excited and passionate to do a project on. According to International Baccalaureate (IB) by doing the Personal Project it can help the students in the future when they apply for college and later on in their career. Through this project, students get to discover more in-depth about their passions and to demonstrate what they’ve learned on their topics.

The 10th-graders explained their struggles and difficulties they’ve faced. Jeremi Yoo  10th-grader said, “choosing any easy topic is easy but the main problem is connecting it with the global context”.

Once the students finished with choosing a topic they had to write process journals to document what they had done on specific days and Kaitlyn Lee 10th-grader said, “I didn’t do my work on time so I had to cram a lot of my process journals and you need to have like ten and I had three, I need seven more.”

After finishing criteria A through D the students had to write a report and Jeremi said, “he struggled with writing a good report”.

A lot of students struggled to keep up with the deadlines because they procrastinate till the very end, 10th-grader Taehyung said, “I didn’t finish my work on time, I have to do it but my body doesn’t allow me to do the project”.

The Personal Project may seem like a lot of work but don’t worry because the 10th-graders, as well as the advisors, have good tips for you. Below listed are the ten tips Mr. Smith, a Personal Project advisor and 10th-graders, Jeremi Yoo, Taehyung Kim and Kaitlyn Lee advised:

• Firstly “Know what you want to do and pick one to two topics beforehand and research on it”
• You should try to think of “Picking a topic that you really enjoy and are passionate about”
• It can also just be an “Easy topic and it needs to be creative”
• This is pretty important, “Picking an advisor that you enjoy being with or an advisor that you are comfortable with”
• One thing most students didn’t do was “Looking at the presentation and asking for help from earlier grades who have already done the project”
• “Asking questions to your advisor when you have any, in other words coming to the advisor and asking “How do I do this” and “How do I fulfill the criterions””
• Always “Follow your action plan” and if you make changes, document it in your journals
• You should always “Start early on your report”
• “Always update your journals and at least have 10 journals in total”
• And finally most importantly “Don’t procrastinate”

Following the above tips will most definitely help you through the Personal Project. To end the Personal Project, to give a better understanding of the overall process 10th-graders have given shared their experiences.

Jeremi Yoo said, “It’s terrible” “The Personal Project is terrible, the perfect example of a procrastination project, but I heard that it helps your career”.

Taehyung Kim said, “It’s hard, but it depends on you if it’s hard or not. If you don’t like writing or don’t like long projects it might be hard for you, but if you’re okay with those then you’ll be fine”.

Kaitlyn Lee said, “Very fun but a stressful experience, but creating the product was fun”.