Victoria Park's Familiar Shore

Victoria Park came to Emerson Latin as an elementary school student, one of the earliest students in the academy's history, and has stayed continuously enrolled ever since: seven years now, spanning nearly the whole of her adolescence. She is, by any real measure, one of the longest-tenured students Emerson Latin has ever taught. This fall, she is applying to university.

She describes her own relationship to the language in a single sentence worth repeating in full: however many seas I cross, Latin shall always be the familiar shore on which I come to rest. It is an unusually accomplished thing for a student to have written, and the record backs it up as plainly as the sentiment does. Victoria has earned Summa Cum Laude on the National Latin Exam in six consecutive years, at every level from her first attempt through this year's Advanced Reading Comprehension, and has twice qualified for the Maurin O'Donnell Scholarship along the way. In last year's Cambridge iGCSE Latin examination, administered and ranked internationally, she placed Top of the World. Most recently, this spring, she earned Summa Cum Laude in the Vergilian Society's Translation Exam, one of a small handful of students worldwide to reach that level.

Latin has never been the only thing she does, and it shows in how she talks about it: as one serious pursuit among several, rather than the whole of her identity. She chairs her school's Latin and Classics Society, where she has organized an enrichment week built around an outside scholarly lecture and led a term of student-run presentations on subjects ranging from Roman cooking to the archaeology of Troy. Outside the classics specifically, she founded and now leads a project digitizing historical documents, including records of enslaved people, through the Smithsonian's digital volunteer program, and has organized a TEDx youth event in her own community. She holds a Gold Certificate from the UK Mathematics Trust's Intermediate Mathematical Challenge and, in acting, has progressed through LAMDA's graded performance exams to a Distinction with Gold Medal at the most advanced level offered. She is, by her parents' and teachers' own description, exceptional, eager, passionate, hard-working, and witty.

Ask her about a specific breakthrough in her studies and she does not reach first for a competition win, though she has plenty to choose from. She reaches instead for a recent lesson in which she and her teacher read one of Ovid's Fasti together, on Arion and the dolphin, and found herself genuinely absorbed in the argument the poem was making, past the level of translation and into the level of thought. She mentions, too, coming around on Vergil, whom she once found difficult and not to her taste, until a particular passage on the nature of Rumour convinced her she had judged him too quickly.

She is, by her own admission, someone who generally avoids formal academies outside of school: she finds most of them stifling, poorly suited to how she actually wants to learn. Emerson Latin, she says plainly, has been the exception. What she values most is not the record above, considerable as it is, but the fact that after seven years the instruction still feels personal: someone who has taken the time to understand how she specifically learns, where she is strong, where she needs to be pushed, and has kept adjusting to that understanding across the whole span of her education so far. She describes her teacher as an invaluable tutor, mentor, companion, and friend, and says she cannot imagine what her life would look like without his influence in it.

Seven years in, Victoria still describes Latin the way she did at the start: with real, undisguised affection for the subject itself, not for what it has done for her. That is rarer than the medal count, and worth noting on its own.