During the Viva Voce after the final submission of my EE, we discussed the outcomes of and learnings from the EE process and the content, areas of improvement, and how I feel about the journey. Although I felt that some things could have been better such as planning, especially with the choice of the RQ for which I felt I would narrow down and have a more refined aim if I were to do it again, there were meaningful learning outcomes from the journey itself such as learning my strengths and weaknesses in such big assignment. I also think the experience of writing an extended essay hinted me a sense of what higher education, which I am planning to pursue, looks like and that by itself was good preparation and warning to myself to be prepared for what will come next. I think the essay itself was not of the quality I wanted it to be, however, I find the content meaningful because the message I was trying to deliver with it also impacted me and my thought process, and that itself is another valuable learning outcome from it.
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I learned more about topology as a focused area of study of “closeness and position”, which I think is a fabulous and accurate way of describing it. I understood the nature of more abstract mathematics as opposed to the regular imaginable (2- or 3- dimensional) mathematics we learn in high school. The learning I have gained, such as the abstract thinking, and different ways of visualizing and thinking about a problem, will be my valuable strengths in and be a great preparation for studying and pursuing a career in mathematics in the future.
Yet I also realized that a focus of my essay should also be in truly understanding and communicate well the learnings such that the readers could also follow my arguments and proofs. Especially since my topic was very visual and abstract, my supervisor suggested that I have far more visualized drawings and illustrations of what I am verbally describing as well as reassuring and making the content more precise and accurate.
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In the meeting before the spring break, my supervisor advised me to do more research to define the direction of my essay and the scale of it, etc. He wanted me to do some maths and show my capability to handle the maths in the topic as the outline, which I haven’t yet managed to complete. My aim now is to get started with writing some maths to set a detailed outline of my essay.
The Story of My Learning Starts Here