In your last year of MYP torture, you will be required to complete a ‘personal project’, which obviously makes up a big chunk of your final MYP grade. For additional torture, some schools – such as mine – may introduce the concept of a ‘mock’ personal project in MYP 4 to prepare you for the real deal.
So, what exactly is this personal project, and how do you go about it? According to the IBO,
“MYP students in their final year explore an area of personal interest over an extended period. It provides them the opportunity to consolidate their learning and develop important skills they’ll need in both further education and life beyond the classroom. It also helps them develop confidence to become principled, lifelong learners.”
Right, so let’s break down this IB bullshit into something much simpler to understand.
Basically, a personal project is like a mini-thesis (the type you do in your final year of university), where you decide to work on something you really like, and then write a report about your entire process as per the guidelines IB gives you. It’s also, in my opinion, a more interesting and fun to do version of the extended essay you’ll have to do in the DP.
BREAKING IT DOWN
Your personal project submission is used to assess you on your skills for self-management, research, communication, critical and creative thinking, and collaboration. This is done by assessing you on three components:
Product or Outcome – This is what you aim to do for your personal project (i.e., make a painting, organize a protest, write a book etc.).
Process Journal – This is where you write everything – and I mean everything – related to your personal project down. You record all of your research, meetings, brainstorming, unedited and edited drafts of your report among other things here. Essentially your grader wants to see your complete progress from when you thought of your initial idea, refined it, planned it, executed it, and reflected it here. The process journal used to be a physical journal you would write in, but now it’s been shifted online so you electronically enter your entries in. When I did my personal project, it was linked to my managebac account.
Report – This is an account of the project you did and its impact, structured according to the assessment criteria. This report includes your bibliography and evidence from the process journal too.
Essentially, your personal project comes down to how well you write your report. Even if you’re unhappy with how your product came out, if you can write a good report which highlights the important bits (even if it means explaining everything that went wrong in your project!) and stick to the assessment criteria, you can get a good grade.
UM… GLOBAL CONTEXTS?
When it comes to choosing your personal project, you need to link it to one of the Global Contexts. Don’t get intimidated by this, or think your options are limited. The best thing you can do is to brainstorm as many ideas as you like and think about ideas that excite you and you’d want to work on. For some people it might be coding related, and for others it could do with exploring their passion for cooking. Once you’ve found an idea you really like, you can always link it back to one of the global contexts with a little tweaking and a sprinkle of bullshit to justify your connection. Hopefully, after spending some years in MYP, most of you know how bullshitting works when it comes to these things. And if you don’t, I’d recommend learning it ASAP. It really makes life a lot simpler.
EXTERNAL MODERATION
One final thing to note before we look at some sample personal projects is the way it is graded. Now the IB does this (really fucked up IMO) thing where they don’t get external moderators to check everyone’s project. Your school is only going to send a handful of personal projects selected at random to the IB for external checking, along with the ‘internal grade’ that the school gives you. External moderators are going to check these sample personal projects and give them a grade.
Now, if these grades differ from the grades the school gave those sample projects, then everyone’s grades are going to change. For example, your school teachers are very lenient in marking and they give a sample project a grade of 7. Now when this sample goes to an external marker, they check it and think the personal project only deserves a 5. What happens next is that IB assumes that teachers inflated everyone’s grades by 2 marks and to fix that they’ll cut two marks out of everyone’s internal grade.
This can feel pretty unfair to people whose personal projects weren’t chosen as samples for external moderation and believe they deserved a better grade. Eventually it goes down to how well your teachers are at marking, and the quality of work that IB gets to see – neither of which are in your hands. Fun!
EXAMPLE #1
I did a mock personal project in MYP 4, and then my final personal project in MYP 5. I received a score of 5 in my final MYP result, which I was quite unhappy with considering I’d scored straight 7s in my internal assessments for the past two years and I’d spent a lot of time and effort working on my project.
For my mock project, I wanted to create an awareness campaign on the plight of stray animals on Pakistan. To do this, I did a lot of research on the condition of stray animals in Pakistan, and narrowed my project down to be more or less centered around Karachi. I had to conduct a lot of primary research since there wasn’t a lot of information available online. This meant visiting animal shelters and taking interviews, asking friends and relatives for numbers of reliable vets, etc.
After gathering all sorts of research about the subject I created a website from scratch using Wix (some of my first website editing experience!). This website contained information about animal shelters in different cities across Pakistan, vets and their timings, articles on how individuals can help stray animals, as well as compiling current news about stray animals (i.e., dog culling in major cities, legislature passing, what animal shelters are doing etc.). I worked on improving my website’s SEO, and having it show at the top in Google’s search results.
Alongside this, I created a brochure on Photoshop about the most vital information related to the topic with text in English and Urdu. I even made an origami dog for the top of the brochure. This project took a lot of my time and needed SO MUCH RESEARCH. Not only primary research on the topic itself and staying up to date on current events, but also on minor things like brochure designing and printing, editing Urdu on Photoshop, SEO and website optimization etc.
Despite all of that, I was genuinely passionate about this project and wanted to make an impact. I loved visiting the animal shelters and seeing people share my website link and respond to my brochures when I was presenting them in our exhibition. That being said, I knew I wouldn’t have this sort of time in MYP 5 to do such an extremely effort-intensive project and learned from my experience.
EXAMPLE #2
For my final project in MYP 5 (the one I got a 5 in), I decided to make an oil painting representing the unsung heroes of Pakistan in all walks of life. Why did I do this? I wanted to connect with my country, its culture, and its history through a medium I love – art. I had never done oil painting before and I wanted to use this experience as a means to learn a new skill. This too required a lot of research into different people’s lives and work before choosing the people I wanted to paint with proper justification of my choice.
Further I took art lessons in oil painting from my art teacher during my free time, and researched on different art styles before settling on ‘realism’. Once I was well-versed with my subject and tool, I started sketching different compositions and practiced drawing and painting realistic sketches of the people I wanted to make. Eventually I shifted onto a much larger canvas (12ftx5ft), and went for it. I really liked working on this one too! It was quite relaxing to unwind from a difficult day at school by painting in the balcony every evening and listening to music. Oil painting is by nature, a slow process, and it took about a month to finish my final product. There were moments where I was, of course, infuriated with my work, progress, or lack of skills, but when it was finally complete, I was quite proud of myself.
What I found most challenging was writing the report itself. Trying to meet the assessment criteria, stay within the word count, and make my report seamlessly transition from one stage to the next proved to be the hardest part for me.
Enjoy a low-quality image of my hard-work (which the school LOST so I can’t even keep it… how does a school lose a 12ft x 5ft painting? I do not know…)
EXAMPLE #3
Eshaal received a 6 for her final personal project. Below is a recount of her experience.
My goal was to build a model of an environmentally friendly society that maximized efficient resource usage. I was going to make a physical model at first, but it became quickly apparent that I am not an artsy person, so I decided to do it digitally using Blender.
This made my life way harder but I think the payoff was good. The project was basically two-pronged: research and building. I shortlisted some UN SDGs and researched technologies that might help achieve those. There was a vague cost-space analysis (zero statistical thinking involved here I literally just averaged out some values for pollution and resource usage based on ~7 major metropolitan cities and compared those to the efficiencies of the tech solutions I found).
For the building part, I made the model as a procedural generation with Blender so that involved learning some Python and Blender basics. I think I've talked about coding the parameters and stuff in my report. The final city was based on the Burgess/CCD model and the final product is a video walkthrough of the city.
The only reason I settled on my final idea was because I was frustrated and everyone else already knew what they wanted to do. I have a Drive folder that I’ve been adding to over the years - it contains research studies, articles, and some of my own assignments about technology and innovations I found interesting. I always wanted to put all that knowledge to use at some point in the future; it was basically a weird utopian fantasy. That, plus how sick I was of not having a topic yet, led me to choose the extremely impractical goal of “creating a self-reliant, environmentally friendly society that maximizes efficient resource usage”. I made a lot of changes along the way (which are detailed in my report) and there was a lot of crying, but I did it anyway.
Attached below are resources from Eshaal’s personal project.
EXAMPLE #4
Zuha also received a 6 in her personal project. Her goal was to create a graphic novel that depicted the role of traditional Pakistani values in tribal communities. She read books and made observations during her personal travels (her father teaches tourism so she goes up north a lot and has a lot of exposure to those cultures) to come up with the plot, and used Photoshop to draw the actual illustrations.
Attached below is the final draft of her personal project report.
LAST PIECES OF ADVICE & OTHER IDEAS FOR THE PERSONAL PROJECT
A vlog series in school
Developing a video advertisement for your school
A booklet of recipes (traditional/western/etc.)
An animated short/stop-motion film detailing how to create one dish
Designing and painting shoes
Mental health awareness campaign
Reducing food wastage campaign
Writing and producing music
Designing a city in Minecraft
Renovating your bedroom
Creating a braille book
Writing a book/poetry
Planning and going on a significant trip
Learning to ride horseback
Developing a boardgame
Creating a brochure about global warming
Painting a mural
Training a pet
Starting a business
Designing and making jewelry
Conducting an experiment and recording your findings
Learning a foreign language
And the list goes on! You can quite literally do whatever you want for your personal project as long as you can justify its significance, link it to the required global contexts etc., and prove you can do a noteworthy amount of work in the time frame. Choose something that truly interests you and run with it!
Before you set on your personal project journey, we would like to offer you some advice from our own experiences.
Keep in mind the timeframe. Don’t choose something overly ambitious or something too easy for your project. You need to do this project over the course of a year, leaving at least a month to refine your final report.
The project needs to be either tangible, or have some sort of tangible proof. For example, if you conduct an awareness campaign or organize a protest or a trip, you would need to show different forms of evidence to show it actually happened (i.e., pictures, brochures, travel itineraries, email chains etc.)
Don’t do overly ambitious projects! Most people don’t follow this advice (Eshaal & I included), but its worth listening to. The biggest problem with having to choose something you’re passionate about for your project is limiting the amount of work you can accomplish in the set timeframe. If you try to complete an overly ambitious project you will burn yourself out, create work you’re unhappy with, be unable to focus on other classes, and feel unsatisfied when the process is over. If you do choose a topic you’re genuinely passionate about and feel like the personal project is limiting you, try thinking of it as the first phase of your main goal. Don’t think of it as the final product, but rather only a part of the thing you want to do. You can always continue working on a project or extending it on your own time! I ended up doing that for the Strays of Pakistan campaign – I kept the site online for several years, revamped it once I got better with Wix, and threw a social fundraiser to raise money for a charity I was genuinely excited about.
Do something you’re willing to work on for a whole year. This is VERY VERY IMPORTANT! If you do a project you’re only half-excited about you will hate working on it consistently for an entire year. The project will feel like an extra burden instead of something you could actually enjoy. While it seems self-explanatory to choose something you love, you may feel pressured to choose a topic that is closer to your field of study (so it helps with college applications), or think you don’t have enough time to choose something so you quickly google a decent idea five minutes before class starts and present it to your teacher. No excuse is worth choosing a project you’re not genuinely excited to work on.
Hopefully this article helped you clear out any fears you had about the personal project. I wish you the best of luck in your journey!
If you have any questions, or want to share your personal project experience, feel free to do so in the comments.
Also, a huge shoutout to Eshaal and Zuha for graciously sharing their personal project reports and resources for this article!
Until next time kiddos.
Sloth memes for today XD
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