Six Degrees Between Us by Sara

Six Degrees Between Us by Sara - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

As you read this, there are six degrees between us. We’re simply six people away.

An Extended Essay, often known as the pinnacle of pain for International Baccalaureate students, is conveniently a dissertation I have been extremely proud to have written. Students are given any subject and topic of their choosing for which they can formulate a research question. and explore. My essay had initially started out as a final paper for my IB Applications and Interpretations class, but as I fell deeper into the topic, it involved my Extended Essay for which I delved further into my topic. Not only did this challenge me to explore a class I wasn’t so familiar or comfortable with (math) but also allowed me to put the subject into a new perspective of game theory.

This shift from seeing math as a set of abstract formulas to viewing it as a lens for understanding human connections sparked my curiosity in a way no textbook had before. I am particularly proud of this assignment due to the level of detail and community it fosters. Essentially, I sought to prove the Six Degrees of Separation theory at my High School to highlight the nature of society and how gossip spreads in a high school setting, which allowed me to tap into my creative abilities while still focusing on math. In efforts to make this project work I creatively designed a system to collect data from students all around the school. I amalgamated a list of every student from each grade level and I selected ten students from each grade level using a mathematical sampling strategy.

Each round of data collection revealed unique patterns like clusters of friends, students who connected to different grades, and nodes that challenged my initial assumptions about how disconnected our school was. From here I sent out various google forms asking my high school’s students who they knew out of the total of forty students. Then I repeated this multiple times to hand-make a graph in google drawing of virtually all the connections within my high school. From here, I would select two random students out of my master list and analyze their level of connection based on my created graph. I used various mathematical tools to highlight how my high school, and in the bigger picture, the world, is a connected community. This project transformed how I approach both math and social questions. Instead of treating network diagrams as abstract exercises, I now see them as maps of human relationships that can be measured, questioned, and even influenced. Designing the sampling method, cleaning the responses, and interpreting the resulting graph taught me that rigorous data collection is as much about understanding people as it is about applying formulas. We know each other in some way or another, so when looking into the world I want to take on, it doesn’t seem so scary anymore.