One year in UWC in Norway — Reflection
The year I spent at the UWC school in Norway has been certainly at the top of the most intensive and exciting experiences I have ever come through. I refound my passion for academic learning, tried many new things and met Aziz Hanafi. This article is my reflection of thoughts, learnings and mistakes. As typical for me, I try to be very to-the-point with an intention to maximize its value for readers and future first years. I will be glad for your feedback and if you find it meaningful, possible sharing with future UWC students.
Disclaimer and most-important advice in one
Many of the UWC and IB resources pretends to have a copyright on truth, while they barely do. This article is written from my perspective — which I believe can be useful for others but needs to be taken as one of the inputs, not as a dogma. Some unnecessary difficulties of my time at RCN were caused by people who “know this, been there”. Also, the syllabus is a subject of continuous change, so beware.
Mistakes
I find it fair and also most useful to start with my mistakes
Struggle to understand the duality
Being a small community, one of the typical features of RCN campuses is that each person has multiple roles — your teacher can be your sport teammate and then a guest on your show. Being not the best teacher is not necessarily making someone a bad person. This didn’t have any apparent impact on me but took me a while to understand.
Room situation
One of the areas I underestimated was the environment in my room. Not anything very severe and no need to go deeply into details, but still. While some things worked pretty well, the next year I need to emphasise more on the study-friendly environment and shared responsibility.
Marginal Utility of Grades
I generally devote quite a lot of energy to academic work, so I don’t regret not spending enough time on it. However, I’m convinced that a relatively low amount of energy spend correctly in the period of a few weeks would lift my current grades more than proportionally — the increase would more than proportionally bigger to spend energy.
Decisions
There have been several decisions that weren’t easy, but I’m satisfied with the result — still worth briefly discuss.
Skipping a grade
Going to UWC meant for me I skipped one grade — at my previous school, I would finish high school in 3 years, it takes me only two in Norway.
This has a positive of being able to enter university and full-time professional career earlier but on the other hand, one year in addition would be nice to improve my algebra skills, English grammar and to pursue some targeted extra academical programs.
Due to my surroundings, studying at a university abroad always felt like a distinct possibility, rather than a serious plan. With my current knowledge, I would go for an AP physics programme, I would start practising for SATs and do one change in my extracurricular activities. Particularly, I think that I have a very solid track record, but would for sure focus more on long-term research projects, rather than a very diverse portfolio of lesser effort activities.
Outdoor leadership & student council
I thought about it and decided not to apply for any of those, but I’m sure that everybody should carefully consider it. There are many challenges and benefits in both, but, as always, you can’t do everything.
Spending time with my 2nd years
I wanted to make sure I will spend enough valuable time with my second years. In my alternative life, I would try to spend a bit more time with a few of them, but overall, I’m satisfied with my both plan and execution.
Subject choices
Maths, physics, economics, were obvious for me. Self-taught was a very specific subject, I will see if it was a good choice based on my final grade. Langlit is a very specific subject, too — but universities rather require some English subject and this would be my first choice then. In the beginning, I was considering chemistry, global politics, geography, ESS as my last subject — the two last-mentioned were certainly not for me, and between Glopo and Chem — both the subjects could be interesting, while Global Politics requiring seemingly lesser effort to get the highest grades. (Don’t have that subject, so don’t listen to me).
A last round of suggestions
I would start practising physics MCQ and P2s earlier. While in mathematical subjects, the feedback is usually clear, in langlit, it took me a while to understand I’m not doing so well. Also, I would recommend tracking your grades from each subject and piece of work, so you can see the progress.
Learnings
If not anything else at all, a year at school abroad is a one big learning opportunity
Passion for learning
Through many long evening study sessions and engaging lessons, I rediscovered my passion for learning. My subject curriculum gave me a chance to do science for at least 5 hours a day.
Recently, I have read some satellite paper as a preparation for my EE — due to my recent progression in maths and physics, I understood everything and it did make perfect sense. Almost a spiritual experience.
As preparation for my first-year exams, I did quite a lot of physics. Actually so much that I dreamt about it — there has been one big whiteboard which I entirely covered with diagrams of gravity, centripetal motion and simple harmonics.
Communication
UWC offers a huge variety of communication situations — across different dynamics, cultures, languages, contexts, forms and stakeholders. Since effective, direct and respectful communication is a great asset, I’m very glad for this training.
Study efficiency
After this year, I’m a much more efficient student than I have been before. I list some of my study tips below. I was forced to higher efficiency simply by the amount of workload and my own aspiration. My previous school has demanded very little and thus I had no incentive to improve my study method.
Study tips
Resources
There are some resources I would rather know before. Ibdocuments.com is a must for past papers. Exammate is very useful for autogenerated quizzes in chemistry. StudyIB fulfils a similar role primarily for physics, but should actually work also for other subjects. Revision Village can be sometimes useful in maths. MSJchem is an obvious one and Khan academy is often saving my life.
My suggestion for everybody would be to download a read a subject guide for each of your subjects before the school years starts — it might feel like a lot but will be very beneficial IMHO. Teachers use to go through them, but it is very easy to forget something from a 70-pages document.
Also, download textbooks (pdfcoffee, pdfdrive or ask your friends) and correct answers sheets — what I didn’t realize is that there are many good questions in textbooks — so if you ask your teachers for worksheets and combine them with textbooks, resources mentioned above and your creativity, you will have more study material then you’ll ever need. Note also that you can download more textbooks for the same subjects — so I have three or four economics textbooks and always choose the one with the best formulation.
Study environment & time management
It is hard for me to study in my room and impossible in the library, so I always pop into some free classroom — physics labs and A2.5 are my favourites. Having a study classroom also helps to distinguish between your schoolwork and free time.
I don’t feel to talk a lot about time management as everybody needs to find their own balance. I find myself using post-it kanban as a useful, but later inspired and transitioned to everything in google-calendar + general task list in Evernote.
There is actually enough time if you approach it in the right way — if you study always from 19–23, you get 4 hours for academics a day, which should be sufficient (actually our Head of Academics once suggested not more than 2 hrs a day, I simply want to study more) and you still have enough time to sleep, sport and for your EACs. Also, weekends are very useful — if I need to catch up on something, I can study for a hell long time and still have time for an afternoon hike.
Studying for exams
This year I made one unnecessary mistake — as for me, studying for exams works as a process
Summarizing >> learning things I don’t understand >> actual learning >> exams practising
I simply should have work on summarizing continuously or enough in advance, to learn then the few things I missed and devote the rest of my time for the last two most important steps. BTW, my smarter peers are using Notion for summarizing, which I highly endorse and recently started used myself.
Cancel culture
I don’t have the ambition to write anything exhausting on this topic. From my point of view, cancel culture is an issue on our campus, as it is an issue in most of western society. Diversity is one thing, but the privileging supremacy of very left-liberal feminine skandi narrative the other one. Having a different opinion, someone will, sooner or later, try to cancel you out or accuse you of racism even you don’t say anything like that.
How to deal with it? I wish I knew, but do have a couple of points: I think it’s a price to pay for an option to study in another (western) country. If there is an option, try to discuss and explain your opinions (interesting contrast when leftists say that you shouldn’t be obligated to explain being different). Also, don’t let others cancel you — they will try, but sometimes it is actually possible to not let them. And personal request — if you have a different opinion than the mainstream, please speak up, because “democracy dies in darkness”.
My experience says that if you try to explain your opinion — your opponents will understand you are not just looking for a cheap conflict — and in the end will promote the plurality.
Most common questions
There are a few questions I’m answering over and over again
What’s next?
I have one more year at RCN in front of me. My next big leap is pretty open at the moment — I will decide based on uni admissions results — all of the scenarios have at least a bachelors degree in applied/engineering physics and economics/international trade minor in common. Possible destinations are the US and Southeast Asia.
Is it cold in Norway?
Overall, yes it is. It can be pretty warm in the summer tho.
Have you seen the northern lights?
Probably yes
How was it with Covid?
Since our campus is rather isolated, it wasn’t as much struggle and we had quite a lot of freedom. Based on current requirements, returning on campus in August, I will celebrate accumulated one month in quarantine in less than a year.
How is Norway?
Getting this question often, no clue what should I answer. I mean, it is nice.
I was also wondering how much will people back home (like my family) change. Empirical experience suggests they changed barely at all.
How is it with your English?
Even when I came to RCN, my conversational English was very okay thanks to my previous working experience. During the year, it has significantly improved. There are still (as you can see) gaps in my grammar. At the moment, the question should actually be: How is your Czech?
Who am I grateful to?
Well, my parents who are generously covering my expenses and then many other stakeholders: teachers, school leadership (which remember all student’s names and make the logistic operation of bringing 100 worldwide students into one small village in Norway), the Norwegian government and many more.
Next year
There are a few things I want to go for next year — on my bucket list, there is a walk to sunrise on Jarstadheia (don’t think I spelt it correctly), ice skating (somehow didn’t manage this year), swimming to physics lesson and an overnight hike
I also think that this year has started a transition in extracurricular activities — at least I perceive it that while previous years you could have done as many things you like — now you have to sort of stick with one activity, while you can choose of peer listening, MUN, first aid, student council. It is obviously more complicated than I write, but again worth considering a bit in advance about which one you want to apply.
Educational system differences
I was asked many times about the difference between the system back home and at my current school, I think there are two major differences.
Firstly, back home you got (with some exceptions) the best grade when you haven’t done any mistake, while in IB, you need to actually prove you deserve the highest grades.
There is also a lot of longer pieces of writing work, which can be nice or very annoying, based on where you stand. Don’t have a lot to say, except — I should take physics mini IA more seriously than I did, I really enjoyed physics actual IA (while doing three other big things) and got a very decent score and I would start searching for economics IA article continuously, not last-minute (a case of my first first draft).
Comparing
Having a diverse student body means also socioeconomic differences. It a topic for me, but fortunately, it is much less apparent than it could have been which I’m happy for.
I also consciously compare myself with some of my benchmark classmates, to see what extracurricular they do and to identify my gaps. (they are Raj (of course), Mayssen, Sara, to mention a few). I’m quite sure it is reciprocal for at least some of them. That being said I don’t mean I wonder the whole day what else can I do and can’t sleep because of that, but rather keep an eye on it.
I have a (quite obvious) strategy for this benchmark — I try to compare my result as objectively as possible, but am always aware of the different circumstances and starting line. There is a difference if you are an outlier genius (Pedro, can I mention you here?) or are exposed to the international environment from an early age, or are from a city and school nobody cares about. So be objective, but be aware.
Talented classmates
Once a friend asked me, who do I consider as a competition. I started naming and continued naming. There are so many classmates who are really talented in their respective field and also really dedicated, which is making RCN the ultimate place where you want to be.
Organizational notes
This will be very boring, so probably skip that. In 99% you don’t need to pay for school trips (while at my previous school, sky trip was an expensive one, you are well off here, it’s free of charge). There are washing machines and dryers — it’s a bit lottery, but usually works. I’m using laundry bags and haven’t lost a single sock. On the other hand, things use to disappear at this amount of people — I’m a very responsible person, but still lost swimming goggles, swimming shorts, gloves, umbrella, hanger and one T-shirt. That being said, I suggest taking more of necessities, i.e. I always have two pairs of headphones and sunglasses and headphones and umbrellas. Disappearing food is for a different discussion. Also, nobody ever asked me for a medical deposit. In Europris, the other shop in Dale, they sell from time to time 5 bars of chocolate for 100NOK. Last time I bought 10 of them straight away.
If you are starting at RCN
I suggest three things — consider subjects, vaccination requirement and study permit requirements.
Closing remarks
Not sure how legal is that, but swimming in the frozen fjord was one of the best things I have done this year.
Hunting PBL is the best thing ever.
Thinking back & having the best curators, I don’t think that speaking at TEDx is the best way to spend your time.
Friluftseka was insanely good and MUN even better. First aid is not really my thing.
Teachers, EAC leaders, House mentor and advisor are writing a record on progress for you — help them with that. Nothing to worry about, but with a bit of sustained effort, you can shape it in a way you like.
Life is much easier if you go to school. I have zero absences, latenesses and about ten prearranged (one competition, some immigration office, one exam). It wasn’t difficult at all, so recommend the same.
I use a habit tracker and highly advise that — routines are key: I track my exercise (at least 30 minutes run, but usually more), math (at least 1 hour a day), sleeping (go to bed before midnight, wake up at 7:40), screen time and mood.
Learn how to iron a shirt. Actually.
So, how was my year at RCN?
It was a lot of fun. A great amount of time with the subjects I like. I held many fun night study sessions with my friends. First time in my life I’m not an outlier within my class group because we all are outliers. I listened to so much good music, Three Days Grace, Green Day, MCR, The Offspring and many more. I climbed with Chris close to every other day. I was running, playing football, table tennis with Jacob and Martynas, I was swimming in the pool and in the fjord. Over the year I spend about 500 hours outdoors — hunting, swimming, kayaking, hiking. While there are fascinating opportunities, the best moments are like when my roommates were packing and I was lying on the floor singing “Born in the USA”. I was surrounded by talented and dedicated classmates and engaging teachers. I was also surrounded by the best landscapes. So as for the option to spend one more year there:
Hell yes, count with me.
