Dear Personal Project student #779— what your supervisor is probably not able to tell you

The Illusion vs. The Reality: What actually happens on the timeline leading up to the personal project report?

Personal Project is not the product, it is the report. Plus, the eyeBee probably won’t even be the ones marking it.

That is it. Screenshot. Set as wallpaper.

See you around…

Personal project summarised by Dear M.

To truly map out your Personal Project journey — or roadblock, depending on how honest you’re being — you might find the following areas helpful at different stages of the process:

1. The Illusion vs. The Reality: What actually happens on the timeline leading up to the personal project report?
2. The Supervisor Tax: Who is actually marking your project, and when does it happen?
3. The Level 7 Mystery: How does the personal project report get marked by the examiner?
4. The Goal: How do you choose a personal project topic that actually works for you?
5. The Guide They Need: How do you become the supervisor a student is actually looking for?
6. Personal project FAQs: What students want to ask about their personal project but usually don’t?

This article focuses on the 1st of these areas: the timeline.

It starts with the personal project (PP) coordinator. Who sets up the personal project play in your school. Assigning students to supervisors, providing official resources and guides. Laying out the handbook. Providing timelines.

You, the student, either start with the PP coordinator or directly with the PP supervisor. A number of documents are shared with you. Assurance given of the available help. And how important this part of the journey is to the eyeBee experience in MYP.

1.1 Supervisor is not at fault

Your supervisor is reading a script from a highly acclaimed eyeBee play. Know the play before thinking of forking it (github term) into your own version.

• Much Ado About a Project (supervisor version)
• Much Ado About a Product (student version)
• Me, Mychild, and the Project (parent version)

In all three versions, the play runs smoothly until right before the intermission — the holidays. After that, nobody really comes back for the second half.

The script relies on four imaginary steps: project launch, the midway point, the crunch, and the final report. It hyper-focuses on global contexts, ATL skills, and the beautiful dream of independent learning.

Why? Because that is exactly what the subject guide states. And as a supervisor, I only have to do what I’m officially told… right?

Much Ado About a Project — performed by Supervisor Quartet

1.2 The real personal project timeline

Here is what the real timeline mostly looks like and what you should actually expect:

The Launch (Stuck in Your Head) You are told to pick your deepest passion. You quickly realize you don’t have one, or at least not one the school will approve. You spend weeks overthinking, trying to turn a simple hobby into a massive academic goal.

The Midway Point (The Ghost Town) The project totally fades from your mind. Term exams, sports, and normal homework take over. Your process journal stays completely blank for months. You falsely comfort yourself by thinking you have plenty of time.

The Crunch / The Display (Pure Panic) The holidays end and reality hits you hard. You suddenly have just two weeks to build a product you haven’t even started. You realize the product does not need to be a masterpiece — it just needs to be finished.

The Report (The Final Grind) The end is not a deep, soulful reflection. It is a mad rush to “compile” months of weekly journal entries over a single weekend. You fight the page count and scramble to paste screenshots of “evidence” into your report.