A Really Long Essay?

What is an Extended Essay? How do I write one? When is it due again?

An Extended Essay is a 4000-word research paper that every student has to complete if they wish to obtain their IB diploma. It is a chance to flex some academic research and writing muscles, and also for most students to curse the high heavens and have a glimpse into their future as college students plowing away late at night writing papers.

Finding yourself in the beginning of your second year of the IB diploma and not having a research question for your Extended Essay yet is a probably a bad situation. I am in that bad situation.

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Red – a poem

                For Hiroshima
red

I woke up to

a deformed sky

doused with the sunrise

the warmth lingered on my skin

the cold flame

chilled me to the bone.

 

I looked out the window

to see a blinding red

coming closer

I wondered

what the divine wind saw

coming closer

cherry blossom farewell

send the sinners home

to mothers

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Walking Forwards Backwards

Life is a hospital in which every patient is obsessed with changing beds…It always seems to me that I’ll be well where I am not, and this question of moving is one that I’m forever entertaining with my soul.’…’poets’, who could not be satisfied with the horizons of home even as they appreciated the limits of other lands, whose temperaments oscillate between hope and despair, childlike idealism and cynicism. – Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel.

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I, for all of my almost-two-decade-long life so far, have been walking forwards facing backwards. Partly because I want to remember what the past was, and to hold on that whatever that is that made me the person I am today. But mostly because I am an adrenaline junkie. Not in the sense that I want to go zip-lining every waking moment, but more like I want to always have exciting things happening in my life.

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