I can’t tell you why I became so obsessed with Queen Victoria and her life, but I can tell you that my independent study on her was the best decision I’ve made in a long time. 

It turns out that buying books at Barnes & Noble is super expensive. Usually I buy my books from the used bookstore across the street from my house, or succumb to the capitalist pigs (oink oink) and order it off of Amazon. But last winter, I found myself with a stack of five books waiting at the check out in Barnes & Noble only to be told my gift card really only had enough credit for one book.

The book I ended up choosing changed the course of my high school “career,” or at least my junior year, thus far. I had chosen “Victoria the Queen,” by Julia Baird, which is a large, dense book, half of which is just sources and notes. The other half is filled with intimate detail on the life of Queen Victoria.

Since preschool we’ve been introduced to a wide variety of academic subjects so that we can find our strengths and weaknesses and use those skills later on in life. In high school those skills get slowly refined, so by the time we go to college, we have the opportunity to change our major a dozen times. Every now and then I go through phases of a complete “geek out” over an area of (often useless) expertise.

Will I be able to make a career out of my extensive knowledge of the life of Queen Victoria? Probably not, but it would be cool. And that’s probably why there isn’t a history course saved for students to study intensely about her life. Still, as students and learners we should expand on these mini areas of expertise or deep interest because it makes learning other, more useful, skills more enjoyable.

Ask me to list all the equations needed to solve kinematics equations from unit 2 in physics, and I’ll start sweating, but ask me to list the names of all of Victoria’s children, and I’ll say them in age order too. The easiest things to learn are the ones that we are passionate about.

When my faculty sponsor, Upper School History teacher Andrew Bigelow, read an early draft of my final project, a research paper, and told me to add footnotes, I clenched my fists. Most of my information had been taken from the few books I owned about her. But I knew that if I wanted to be satisfied with my work, I needed to expand my research (and I knew I couldn’t get away with only using three sources if I added in footnotes).

The hours of time spent in front of my laptop researching her, instead of rewatching “The Office,” definitely paid off. My paper nearly tripled in size, and I found myself even more engrossed.

I used to think students who did independent studies wanted to have another trophy or checkbox marked for their college applications, but that definitely is not always the case.

So I urge you to be selfish. If you want to learn more about World War II fighter jets or the life cycle of a bee, go nuts. If you hate learning about American History or reading “The Scarlet Letter,” then you owe it to yourself to learn about something interesting to you to get the best out of your time at this school. Parker has given us the tools to indulge in our interests, or guilty pleasures, which in turn can make us better and more attentive students.