The first meeting with your supervisor

Once you have determined an area of investigation in chemistry and your supervisor is agreed then you should arrange to meet with your supervisor as soon as you can. Later, you will have three official meetings with your supervisor called the 'reflection meetings' but this first meeting is to help to get you underway. Some supervisors may divide this first meeting into two.  For the first part they may put all their chemistry supervisees together to explain the general points then talk with you individually about your own specific investigation.

General points

This is the normally the first part of the meeting that covers all the general points (and saves your supervisor having to repeat everything). Obviously your own supervisor will have his or her own agenda but these are the sort of areas that will probably be covered once you have been welcomed to the meeting.

• Success will come with hard work. Along the way there will be frustrations and disappointments but if you stick at it you will succeed.
• Remember that the only thing that is actually assessed is the final essay and you need to keep this in mind throughout.
• Keep a diary and record all the details about every resource you consult. The IB officially calls this the Researcher's reflection space. It can be a handwritten diary but it probably makes more sense for it to be in digital format, although if that is the case make sure you keep a regularly updated backup copy.
• Don't just refer to and use Wikipedia. Wikipedia can be quite a useful starting point but that is all. You should be basing your knowledge on sources that have been peer reviewed. These appear in journals and books. For each website you access or newspaper article you read try to locate the original source upon which it was based.
• Plan your time so that you do not leave it all until the actual deadlines.
• Make sure you understand how to work in the laboratory – safety rules, risk assessments etc.
• It is helpful if your supervisor gives you the assessment criteria, the introductory part of the IB Extended Essay Guide and the subject specific Chemistry part of it. It is also helpful if they direct you to examples of past excellent Extended Essays in chemistry (in the library and on the school’s server).
• Make sure you understand about Plagiarism and other forms of malpractice.

Individual Meeting

The focus of this meeting is to get you actually started on the research process in earnest. You have already agreed your general area of investigation. You need to discuss with your supervisor how you can go about refining this to an actual research topic. Try to list what you already know about the area and then through discussion with your supervisor try to home in on a more focused component of the area that could lead to a potentially good research question. For example, one common general area is ‘something to do with drugs’. By a process of elimination it should emerge from the discussion that drugs such as mild pain killers or antacids are going to be much more suitable to study in a school laboratory than others that may be illegal or too complex. Equally the testing of drugs on animals or humans is against ethical and Health and Safety guidelines etc. so this can lead to questions as what can be done in a laboratory. Obvious answers are techniques like separation of the pure drug from a mixture (e.g. steam distillation, chromatography), analysis by titration (redox or acid-base), preparation of a drug or analogues of it etc. What you should now do is read around the more focused area. Hopefully your supervisor may direct you to some initial resources as well as Internet search engines from which you can try to find out and what is and what is not known. You should be continually asking yourself, ‘How does it all fit into my existing knowledge of chemistry?’ and ‘How could I research this further?’ 

Finally you should agree with your supervisor a time for the next meeting to discuss your findings and try to agree on the wording for your focused research question.