I knew right away that I would do an essay on psychology as it was the subject I was most interested in. Initially, I wanted to work on happiness and how it is induced in a teenager and in what amounts. However, after talking to my supervisor I realized that there were a lot of aspects in my topic that was ambiguous and even narrowing down my research question didn’t do any better because I lacked significant research for that topic. I decided to start from the drawing board and I started considering topics only after I had found sufficient research behind it. After some contemplation, I decided that I am going to look into maternal depression, I concluded it to be my best topic to move forward with as it ticked all my checkboxes and while I was looking over the topic’s research itself, I was able to formulate an intelligible and to the point RQ; “To what extent does maternal depression in a mother affect the child’s cognitive development.”

The number of resources I discovered was much more than I initially thought I would find. At first, I was happy that I was able to find so much data and information to analyze, I gained a lot of familiarity with my topic, I came to know of various types of maternal depression, the common symptoms they adhere to and how all of this had a general effect in a child’s early life.. Howbeit, after going through my research in detail, I realized an enormous portion of my research was either extraneous or repetitive. After I removed all the unnecessary content, I only focussed on research papers and statistics from government research websites. My supervisor had advised me to stray away from pop psychology and only use credible sources and this really helped me to refine my research and make it relevant.

This was by far the most strenuous part of the extended essay, writing it. I had 20 tabs open, had my energy bar and coffee and an hour had passed and I had barely written 300 words. I kept redoing my work because as I proofread whatever I read, I noticed how lousy my writing was. I had to put a pause on all my studies and had to cram all of my writing into almost 1 week before the deadline. Be that as it may, I never had to stop writing because of the abundant research I had managed to do beforehand. This made the writing process a tad smoother once I got started. I believe my research experience was quite valuable for me as it was not only something that significantly enhanced my writing efficiency but it is also the part I had the most fun doing. Discovering new and compelling research into how the brain develops and responds to the depression of another person was fascinating to know. However, The one thing I’d tell my younger self would be to start writing earlier.