The Maureen O’Donnell Scholarship is awarded annually by the National Latin Exam to students who have earned Gold Medals at its most advanced levels — Advanced Prose, Advanced Poetry, and Advanced Reading Comprehension. These are the levels at which the NLE ceases to be a measure of formation in progress and becomes a measure of Latin that has arrived: read with the precision and fluency that only sustained, serious study produces. Nomination is itself a distinction. It means the examiners have identified the student as among the most accomplished Latin scholars in the country.
In 2024, Hunjae Lee and Gyuyeon Park were nominated — two students, both ineligible because neither had yet reached their senior year. This year, five students from Emerson Latin were nominated: Charles Cho, Hunjae Lee, Jihan Lee, Victoria Park, and Jonghyun Seo. All five are ineligible. None is a senior. The scholarship requires that applicants intend to pursue at least six credit hours of Latin in their first year of college, which presupposes that college is imminent. For these five, it is not.
What can be said about this situation has been said before, on this page, in simpler form: the nomination stands regardless of eligibility. To be found scholarship-worthy before one is old enough to receive the scholarship is a distinction the rules cannot diminish. Five nominations from a single academy in a single year, all from students who remain years from their senior year, is a result worth recording with the composure it deserves. We are proud of all five.
Several of these names have appeared in this record before, and not only in connection with the NLE. Victoria Park appears in the FOBISIA Poetry Competition, the SCRIBO Latin Writing Contest, and across multiple years of NLE results. Jonghyun Seo achieved a Perfect Paper on the NLE in 2024 and was named among the NLVE World Champions the same year. Hunjae Lee placed first in the CAMWS Latin Translation Contest and holds the same World Champion distinction. The Maureen O’Donnell nomination is not the whole of what any of these students have done; it is one more entry in records that have been accumulating for some time.
The scholarship will be available to them in due course. When it is, they will have had additional years of Latin study behind them. We look forward to recording that entry as well.