Profile on IB Students – Nick Mitchell, Julia Higdon, Vicky Angelova

This is the third of an article series featuring all IB Diploma students:

Now that the IB exams have been canceled, the future of the students’ IB diplomas was in jeopardy for some time. Students have been working for their junior and senior years toward these exams, and now that they’re canceled, the IB program will be using IAs to count as final grades for the students.

Julia Higdon, Vicky Angelova, and Nick Mitchell are part of the IB Diploma Class of 2020. They have been conducting business as usual as possible, with this challenge of online classes, and will be graduating despite not having taken the exams. These students have put countless hours into the IB Diploma, and their adventure is finally coming to an end.

Julia Higdon
Julia Higdon has an identical twin who is also doing the IB Diploma. She has sectoral heterochromia (meaning her eyes are two different colors) in her right eye. Her thumbs are double-jointed, and she is terrified of butterflies. Higdon has been to 28 Cubs games including ones in Arizona, Illinois, and Denver. She has been to Hawaii 14 times. Higdon will be attending Chapman University and majoring in biological sciences.

Higdon chose to take the IB Diploma because she likes the structure of the classes as well as the community of the program. She believes the community of the program is extremely supportive, and everyone tries to ease the most amount of stress they can. She was also going to take all of the classes anyway, so she figured she should just do it.

For Higdon, the best part of the IB Diploma was taking TOK. She thought it was a very interesting approach to how we learn and the fundamentals of it. She also loved the competition between the HL and SL math classes. Overall, she has really enjoyed getting to know all of the people in the program.

Vicky Angelova
Vicky Angelova loves to travel. She has traveled to over twenty countries and lived in Europe for two years. She also likes to write, run, watch psychology videos, and hang out with friends. She plans to attend CMC for one semester, then transfer to the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Taking the diploma was a spur of the moment decision for Angelova. She originally had all of her classes IB, except for French. On the last day of her sophomore year, she decided to take IB French and the diploma curriculum because most of her classes were IB anyways. Angelova’s biggest struggle in IB Diploma was all of the writing and the work that is done, as well as not being able to take elective classes.

Nick Mitchell
Nick Mitchell will be attending the University of St. Andrews in the fall. He will be majoring in English. Mitchell chose to take IB Diploma because he figured it would help showcase academic rigor to colleges.

Mitchell would only suggest IB Diploma to people with a high scholastic drive. Over this past year, he has struggled with motivation for school, so he believes choosing to take the Diploma depends on how much mental strength a person has.