Grace Tetley | Celebrating Our 2024 IB Results

Grace: Hi, my name is Grace!

I live in France, right next to Switzerland, and my hobbies include photography, reading, and scouting. Academically, I’m interested in everything related to modern history and politics. I find it so interesting how the two subjects combine to shape the world we currently live in.

Grace: I was homeschooled by my parents for my whole educational journey, and so coming to King’s InterHigh was a logical next step for me. I had to make the choice of A Levels or IB, and growing up in Geneva (a very international area), as well as desiring a broad curriculum, convinced me to choose IB.

Grace: One of my favourite things about this school and the IB program specifically has been the people I’ve been able to meet across the course. Having classmates in over 30 different countries is a truly rewarding experience, and getting to make friends that live all over the world is a memory that I will never forget.

So many of the teachers have also made my experience incredibly rewarding through the support and care they’ve shown me throughout the course.

Grace: History! I absolutely adored the IB History curriculum, and I took it at HL. I also chose to do my Extended Essay in the subject, delving into the impact that photography had on anti-war attitudes towards the Vietnam War in the US of the 1960s.

It has definitely been hard work, but the focus on the impact and influence of historical events, as well as the perspective the course took on the concept of causation, led to me deciding to pursue history for my undergraduate degree.

Grace: My IB subjects had both exams and coursework, and I took History, Business Management and Biology at Higher Level, and Spanish ab initio, Maths AA and English Language and Literature at Standard Level.

In addition to this, I also studied Theory of Knowledge, a philosophy style course, which is a requirement for IB, and the Creativity, Activity and Service component of the diploma.

Grace: Exam preparation was done throughout the years of the diploma, through completing mock examinations, quizzes, revision, essays and in-class work.

The teachers had a true passion for their subjects and were totally happy to mark and give feedback on any practice work I sent to them, something for which I am truly grateful.

Grace: A teacher that was incredibly helpful throughout the revision process was Ms. Markham, one of my IB English teachers!

She provided my class with a variety of different resources, and was always so happy to meet with me after class to discuss practice papers I had completed, theses for essays, and essay plans, right up until the final exam date.

She also created a collection of incredibly useful tutorials for how to answer essay questions using the texts we had studied throughout the year, explaining in detail the approaches necessary to score well if we opened the paper to find similar questions on the exam date!

I am incredibly grateful to her for the help she provided for this subject.

Grace: Mindmaps! I did mindmaps on my iPad and on whiteboards to help revise complicated subjects such as Biology and Business Management, and to help remember events in History.

Another useful technique was the Pomodoro focus method, a technique that helped me stay on task during revision and keep motivated.

Grace: Leave the house during revision season! This may seem counterproductive, but changing your environment for revision can help with focus and motivation!

I spent my exam period and the weeks running up to my exams studying in a local library, and it was incredibly useful for study motivation, access to iced coffee (from the store next door!), and for maintaining my focus and endurance throughout the lengthy period.

Changing my environment also prevented me from getting bored or fed up during revision as the library was a new and interesting place. Being surrounded by other focused people was also incredibly useful.

Grace: I’m hoping to head to either Durham University or Cardiff University in the UK to start a degree on History and Politics, and maybe eventually end up working in the international sphere once I’ve completed the degree. However, only time will tell where I end up!