Meet Bella
"The IB helps you to connect knowledge, open your mind, and it’s geared to make you love learning. It’s allowed me to delve deeper into my passions and given me an awareness of how my actions affect my community.
IB has a reputation for being more challenging academically than NCEA, but actually, it just forces you to be organised. If you put the work in and show initiative you will get the results you want. The great thing about SMC is our teachers are engaging and that helps keep my attention focused on my learning.
One of the elements of the IB is the extended essay. We discuss this at our IB camp early in Year 12 and it’s a couple of thousand words on a subject you are passionate about. My subject will be English but I’m still deciding the exact topic.
Another element is CAS - Creativity, Activity and Service. I wasn’t sure what would be required for Creativity, but the Year 13 IB cohort talked to us when we were making our subject selections and that helped me to understand the flexibility of the creativity element."
