EPQs, mocks and coursework

Greetings, readers!

I trust you are doing well? For me, January is proving to be a very busy month and this is primarily down to school so I sincerely hope you aren't all sharing in my feelings of stress.

The workload of my Extended Project Qualification is continuing as strongly as ever. I do find it really interesting. I guess that's why they let us pick the topic - if I was just given a title to work with I would have dropped the qualification months ago. As it is, my EPQ is all about Natural Horsemanship. I'm so bad (or good, depending on your point of view) at procrastinating that the months where I should have been completing all my research went to waste and the actual essay writing part was delayed. I'm getting back on track now thanks to an extension, but it is still a lot to deal with given other school work that demands attention. For more organised people, I'm fairly sure the EPQ is a breeze.

On top of that I have mock exams and more coursework to complete. It feels like Christmas was several months ago as it really wasn't much of a break. As soon as Christmas and Boxing Day were out of the way I began revising for the mocks in earnest because I really hadn't been too productive. This mostly involved preparing for my History mock as it is probably the subject I struggle with the most. My teacher had thankfully taken pity on us and provided us with the questions that we would be able to answer in the mock examination, so at least I could properly revise with the question in mind. On the plus side, I was off timetable for mock week so at least I get a bit of an extra holiday in that sense.

Now that the mocks are out of the way, however, it means that I now have two pieces of coursework to complete. Whilst these are shorter than the EPQ (these are 2,000 and 3,000 words) it is so much harder because you actually have to stick to the word limit. This is quite difficult given the amount you have to include to get a decent mark, so here's to a month of writing, editing, rewriting and more editing on really depressing topics!

In all honesty though, I knew this month was going to be busy. Now that school is about to start again all the teachers will be very aware that we pretty much only have four months before we go on study leave so there isn't much time left to complete the courses and do practice papers and the likes. Even so, knowing is different to experiencing. Is it foolish to be optimistic that it won't be too bad? I hope not, because optimism is definitely one of the few things keeping the anxiety at bay!

I hope you all had a lovely holiday and are able to have a relaxing start to the new year.

Until next time!