St. Paul senior heading to Oxford University

BY BILL DOYLE
CFP CORRESPONDENT
WORCESTER - Isabella Christie has never been to the town of Oxford, which is located only about 10 miles from her home. But the senior at St. Paul Diocesan Junior-Senior High School plans to spend four years in Oxford, England. In the fall, she’ll become what is believed to be the first student from a Worcester Diocesan high school to attend the University of Oxford.
“That’s really cool,” she said.
She’s not at all intimidated by studying at a university in a foreign country 3,250 miles from home.
“I’m very excited about that,” she said.
The summer after her freshman year of high school, she attended a program for young artists at New York University for a month.
“That was the most fun I’ve ever had,” she said. “It was so awesome, even though, looking back, sending a 14-year-old to New York is a little risky.”
Isabella, 17, is mature beyond her years, indicated by her decision to teach herself to speak French during the height of the pandemic. She had taken Spanish her first three years of high school, but last summer she took a daily, hour-long Lingoda language course in French. Kelli Reyngoudt, St. Paul’s director of school and college counseling, said Isabella began reading the French newspaper, Le Monde, for fun.
This year, she’s taking AP French online via Virtual High School. Frances Dodson, her AP French instructor, lives in Texas and has never met Isabella in person, but in her college recommendation letter she said Isabella spoke French so well, she thought perhaps she had French-speaking parents and spoke it at home.
She was astounded to learn that Isabella had taught herself to speak the language.
Isabella was ranked No. 1 in her junior class and she is on target to graduate as the valedictorian of her senior class of 123 students.
“I’m happy about it,” she said, “but a little nervous to give the speech.”
She has not received a final grade of lower than an A-minus in any class in high school.
Isabella lives in Worcester with her parents, Sarah and Jim, and her brothers, James, 15, a freshman at South High School, and Nick, 13, an eighth-grader at Sullivan Middle School. The boys belong to the Goddard Scholars Academy, which is an academically accelerated magnet school for highly motivated, high-achieving students in the Worcester Public Schools, according to worcesterschools.org.
Her mother is an attorney and her father is a chemist.
“I was really grateful for the emphasis my parents placed on education,” Isabella said.
She believes she and her brothers benefited from the small class sizes and greater attention from teachers while attending Venerini Academy, a Catholic elementary and middle school. Then she attended St. Peter-Marian Central Catholic Junior-Senior High School for two years before it merged with Holy Name Central Catholic Junior-Senior High School to form St. Paul’s.
In February, Isabella traveled overseas for the first time when she visited Oxford during school break with her mother, grandmother and brothers. She met the tutors she spoke with during her college interview. 
“It was such a nice city,” she said. “I didn’t realize that it was going to be so lively. There were people out everywhere.”
The pandemic prevented her from attending any summer programs in 2020, but last summer she read Plato’s Crito and some of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics during a humanities program at Assumption University.
She is a member of the National Honor Society and Model UN. She’s a copy editor for the school newspaper, the St. Paul Gazette, and she somehow finds time for a job at Pepe’s Taqueria in Tatnuck Square. She also belongs to the school’s Red Cross Club.
Isabella estimated that she read about 75 books last year, usually more than one at a time, and she continues to read a lot. It isn’t light reading. She enjoys such Russian authors as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev, and she just reread the Odyssey. Her father enjoys philosophy, and she reads from his bookshelf.
“She’s just not your typical high school senior these days,” Ms. Reyngoudt said.
Nevertheless, Isabella is friendly with just about anyone.
“I learned that just because people don’t have the exact same interests as me doesn’t mean we can’t get along,” she said.
“She’s just an exceptional, fascinating student,” Ms. Reyngoudt said. “She’s very well respected, she’s very unassuming, smart, fun, has a nice group of friends, just a wonderful person.”
At Oxford, she’ll most likely study with students just like her.
“That’s exactly what my mom said,” she said. “I just can’t wait for that.”
Her goal is to become a Classics professor.
In his letter of recommendation, Jonathan Meagher, her AP U.S. history teacher her junior year, was impressed by her decision to write about the impact of classical philosophy on the founders of American democracy for her research paper. He said he never had a student motivated to tackle such a difficult topic and that he learned a great deal from her report.
Getting accepted at Oxford takes more than filing out applications and getting letters of recommendation. Isabella traveled to the Russian School of Mathematics in Newton in November to take Oxford’s language aptitude test which required her to translate Greek sentences and Hungarian verbs.
“You just look for patterns and try to figure it out,” she said.
She also submitted two written assignments before advancing to the interview stage of the admission process.
In early December, she interviewed remotely with Oxford officials from the conference room at St. Paul’s Academic Success Center. About 20 minutes before her general Classics and philosophy interviews, she received literature to study and then answered questions.
“I was more nervous in the beginning,” she said, “but both times as the conversation started, I got into it, especially the philosophy one. I felt like that was a really fun time.”
Isabella was also accepted at the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh, both in Scotland, as well as Georgetown, Villanova, Fordham and UMass-Amherst. She said she chose Oxford largely because of its renowned Classics department and its tutorial system in which a professor works with one or two students on their writing.
According to Oxford’s website, as of December 2020, 246 of the university’s 12,510 undergraduate students were from the U.S. Isabella believes that she’s the only American freshman who will enter Regent’s Park College in the fall. Regent’s Park, one of Oxford’s 39 colleges, specializes in the arts and humanities.
At Oxford, students study only one subject. There are no minors or electives. So, Isabella will study only Classics for four years. During her first year, she expects her schedule to include studying Homer’s Iliad, Athenian drama and the writings of Herodotus while taking Greek five days a week.
A total of 28 British prime ministers attended Oxford. Isabella was happy to see that current Prime Minister Boris Johnson studied Classics there. Other alumni include former U.S. President Bill Clinton, scientist Stephen Hawking, Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, English statesman Sir Walter Raleigh (in the 1500s) and U.S. Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan, who studied at Worcester College there.