Edna L | Karolineska Institute (Sweden)

Edna has already received the full offer from her dream university from Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Founded in 1810, the Karolinska Institute is consistently ranked amongst the world's best medical schools. It was placed as the best in Sweden, 3rd in Europe and 5th worldwide in 2020 by the QS Ranking. In 2021, it was ranked 10th worldwide and 5th in Europe in clinical, pre-clinical and other health subjects by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. To date, it has produced six Nobel Prize laureates.

Our Class of 2023 has a great number of long-standing students, with 12 of them stayed with us for 10 or more years, and Edna is one of them. She is one of our longest - standing students who studied at DCSZ for 14 years. She has not just demonstrated a high level of academic achievements but has benefited from our holistic approach to education. She has participated in arts, student leadership and sport activities and also got extensive experience in leading charity projects during her time in the Senior School. During the past 14 years, like many of our families, her family have made a significant contribution to our community. In November last year, we published her family story which can be viewed at the end of this article.

What is the secret behind her perfect score and her development as a person? Let us learn from Edna’s experience.

Perseverance is the Key

From an overall perspective, Edna sees her IB journey as a huge rollercoaster, “I experienced many ups and downs throughout my two years and personally the most challenging part would be all the essay writing such as IAs, the EE and TOK,” she said.

By taking Chemistry IA as one example, Edna pointed out wisely that perseverance is definitely the key to success. “The Chemistry IA was all really new to me,” she said, “We had to design a creative experiment, understand the science behind it and also be able to coherently write it on a 12-page document. I spent a lot of my time in the Chemistry lab repeating and trying to tweak my experiments, and I would say that perseverance was probably the most important thing I learnt. Additionally, planning ahead was also essential as it meant that I was able to meet my deadlines and not have an unsustainable workload.”