The Extended Essay process prepares students for success in college.

Why is it worth doing a monograph?

TheExtended Essay(EE ) provides you with a unique opportunity to explore an academic area of personal interest. It is a research paper that you write independently, giving you the advantage of demonstrating your passion, enthusiasm, intellectual initiative and creative approach to a topic of your choice, on which you conduct an in-depth and focused analysis in order to critically answer questions of global importance. It is one of the elements at the heart of the IB Diploma program.

Through the Monograph production process, you develop important transferable skills - such as research, critical thinking and self-management (the importance of which I will explain later in this article) - that are communicated in the form of a written academic paper. It is important to highlight the commitment you will have to the research process and in the reflection you will make on this process, highlighting your intellectual and personal journey, and how this process comes to change you during your learning, as well as impacting the final version of your work.

In this article I will tell you what a Monograph is, what you will learn by doing a Monograph and why it is one of the most important benefits you can get from the IB Diploma Program(International Baccalaureate).

Preparing a Monograph gives you the great advantage of developing skills not only useful for your day to day life as an IB student, but also very valuable in the long term for when you enter university, since they will facilitate your research and writing of texts, lab reports or even your thesis to finish your degree. That is why producing a monograph provides you with the following benefits:  

• It teaches you to inquire, which is very important because you will always be looking for new information from different sources, you will want to learn more and more, making you a person with extensive knowledge about different areas.
• It teaches you to understand topics in a conceptual way; that is, you will understand concepts without the need for examples, you will be able to visualize difficult concepts to understand them more easily.
• It teaches you to understand social and political problems in a broader and more global way, allowing you to learn about different social contexts in order to understand the world and social relations more clearly.
• Satisfy your interests since it is highly personal work that is designed to give you the learning you need as an IB student.
• In evaluating you, they will do so in a way that will not only help you learn concepts about your work, but will also help you improve and grow as a human being. 

Thanks to the Monografías process you will develop skills that you already have, but that in other jobs you don't usually use much and that, nevertheless, are of vital importance for any area of life you can think of; sometimes it is complicated to develop them with simpler tasks that teachers assign us, so you should take the opportunity to practice them; the skills I am referring to are the following:

• Thinking skills: to analyze and understand any information presented to you concisely, quickly and effectively.
• Communication skills: to express -in a clear and understandable way for any reader- what you think, then it will serve you for any work that requires you to explain something about any topic. In addition, you will strengthen your ability to formulate arguments clearly and coherently.
• Social skills: when you have to talk to your consultant to explain your work, you will improve the way you relate to other people; this will help you establish interpersonal relationships that translate into contact and friendships that will be useful in the present and future.
• Self-management skills: being a job that you have to produce from start to finish, taking special care and attention in your organization and time management, you will learn that you alone can do a job without anyone chasing you, you will achieve the difficult task of not leaving the tasks or activities to the end.
• Research skills: you will be able to perfectly search for reliable and clear information that will be useful for what you are looking to do, so you will not have to waste your time in information that will not serve you for anything. You will learn to cite and give author credits so you don't go through life plagiarizing ideas that don't belong to you. You will be able to identify when a source of information is not reliable, so you will stop wasting your time on information of dubious origin. 

TheExtended Essay is perhaps the most inquiry-based activity you will undertake during the IB Diploma Program, especially since it is a completely open-ended assignment, driven by your interest in the topic of your choice; you can do this work on activities or areas of knowledge that you enjoy or are passionate about and, if you choose correctly, it is a lot of fun. This is no coincidence: the goal of the Essay(EE) is to encourage students like you to intentionally examine, in depth and intentionally, important issues and areas of research that are of personal interest to you. Through research, as a student you not only learn about the topic of focus of your Monograph, methodology and critical thinking (i.e., you not only learn about the process of writing the Monograph), but another advantage is that you develop important transferable soft skills such as time management, perseverance, resilience and decision making.

In the following, I recapitulate -as a list- the reasons why it is very worthwhile to live the process of elaborating the Monograph during your studies of the IB Diploma Program; for this list I have been guided by Antoni Moragues, who has written a text on Aplicación de la Monografía en 1º de Bachillerato con la metodología del programa IB (Application of the Monograph in the 1st year of Bachillerato with the methodology of the IB program):

• You will be able to distinguish between the basic and secondary aspects of the area you are studying.
• You will mature the ability to identify problems and formulate questions.
• You will be able to state the justification for your research (why it is important).
• You will be able to plan your actions and thus manage your time to move forward.
• Strengthen your ability to search for appropriate information from reliable sources.
• You will be able to propose possible explanations or hypotheses that provide solutions to the problem.
• You will mature in the application of research methodology and the collection of results.
• Thanks to critical thinking, you will be able to compare the information you had at the beginning with the findings of the results.
• You will be able to reach your own conclusions and argue them.
• You will enhance your oral and written communication and expression, putting it at the service of your research and knowledge dissemination objectives.

But... what is a Monograph and how do I do it?

Okay! I think we're doing well so far, but exactly how do you do a Monograph?

First, it is important to be clear that the Monograph is an in-depth study of a well-delimited topic that you will have the opportunity to freely choose from a list of available subjects from the IB Diploma Program, such as: Literature, Drama, English (in this particular case, you will have the great opportunity to write the monograph in English language), Biology or Mathematics. The specific topic you will delve into can be related to any of these subjects that catches your attention; as a recommendation, I would say to make a list of topics that you like to talk about or that simply appeal to you; then look for which of the subjects your topic might fit into so that you can write your Monograph on something you really enjoy.

You will have a professor who teaches the subject you have chosen and who will advise you during the process of producing your Monograph; he or she will help you whenever you get lost with the instructions and will be checking your progress closely.

The result of your research will be translated into a structured written work, whose formal presentation follows predetermined guidelines provided by the IB and in which ideas and results are communicated in a reasoned and logical manner.

Here are some of the most important specifications that every student who aspires to become an IB student should take into account:

• The Monograph is mandatory for all students taking the IB Diploma Program. At Celaya University High School you will have the opportunity to choose that program if you decide that the IB challenge is for you.
• The Monograph is externally assessed, which means that an assessor you do not know will assess your work using assessment criteria established by the IB itself and used in all IB schools.
• The Monograph process prepares IB students for success in university and beyond after the Diploma Programme. To choose a subject for the Monograph, students should consult the list of approved IB Diploma Programme subjects, taking into account the availability of advisors within the institution in which they are enrolled. It is presented as a formal academic work with a maximum length of 4,000 words, accompanied by a reflection form, which is a format in which you will write about your experience and how your processes and progress were; this reflection cannot be longer than 500 words.It involves approximately 40 hours of work by the IB student throughout the first three semesters of the IB Diploma Program.IB students are supported in a recommended supervision process of between 3 and 5 hours, which includes three mandatory reflection sessions, in which your advisor will help you and evaluate the work you have done.
• The third and last mandatory reflection session is the final interview, which is a concluding interview with the supervising professor in which you will be able to see how your advisor perceived your progress and your learning from this work.

Now you know some of the most relevant benefits that, from my point of view, the Monograph production process offers you, one of the core components of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (DP). I hope you will make the decision to live the challenge of the program and become a high performing student because ... being IB is worth it!

If you are interested in receiving more information about the IB Diploma Program at the University of Celaya, please contact us at https://www.udec.edu.mx/prepa-uni/ If you have any questions or concerns that you or your parents may have about this program, please feel free to contact the IB Diploma Program Coordinator at Uni de Celaya: Alejandra Núñez via email at: alenugo@udec.edu.mx or by phone +52 (461) 613 90 99 Ext. 1411.

Bibliographic references

• International Baccalaureate (2016). Monograph guide.