It is our privilege to announce that three Emerson Latin scholars have been nominated for the 2026 Maureen O’Donnell Scholarship for Academic Excellence, the most distinguished award conferred by the National Latin Exam. The nomination is reserved exclusively for those who have earned gold medals on the Exam’s Advanced examinations — Advanced Prose, Advanced Poetry, or Advanced Reading Comprehension — the highest tier of the National Latin Exam’s offerings.
- Edward ChaAdvanced Reading Comprehension
- Victoria Gyuyeon ParkAdvanced Reading Comprehension
- Jihan LeeAdvanced Poetry
The scholarship bears the name of Maureen O’Donnell, one of the founding architects of the National Latin Exam. A Latin teacher at the Westminster School in Virginia and later at W. T. Woodson High School, she was named Virginia Teacher of the Year in 1983, received a Fulbright Fellowship to Rome in 1985, and was conferred an honorary doctorate by Yale University in 1982 — its citation reading, in part, that she had “made Latin live.” To her students she was simply mater. Since the scholarship’s inception, the National Latin Exam has awarded over two million dollars in her honor. Each year, from a national pool of gold medalists on the Advanced examinations, the Committee names twenty-one scholars and five alternates. To be nominated is itself a recognition of distinction.
Of particular note is that two of this year’s nominees — Victoria Gyuyeon Park and Jihan Lee — were also among the five Emerson Latin scholars nominated for the 2025 scholarship. To earn the highest gold-medal designation on the Advanced exams in consecutive years, while still in the underclassman years of high school, is a feat of uncommon discipline. Edward Cha joins them this year as a fellow nominee, completing a trio whose achievement reflects a sustained intellectual seriousness rarely seen at their stage of formation.
As we observed last year, the scholarship itself remains the province of high school seniors — those preparing to carry Latin and Greek into their first year of university. Edward, Victoria, and Jihan, being sophomores and juniors, are not yet of an age to accept the award. And yet the nomination is no less significant; if anything, more so. Where the scholarship’s recipients are typically students on the threshold of college, our scholars have reached that same distinction with two and three years still ahead of them in their secondary studies.
Maureen O’Donnell taught Latin for thirty-five years. Her conviction — that the classical languages deserve to be taught with care, rigor, and a love of the texts themselves — is one Emerson Latin shares. The continued recognition of our students by the National Latin Exam Committee suggests that the standard she set, and which her colleagues at the NLE continue to uphold, can be met by serious students taught in earnest.
To Edward, Victoria, and Jihan: our warmest congratulations. We look forward to the years ahead, when, as seniors, you will again find yourselves among the names the National Latin Exam Committee chooses to honor.
Macte virtute.
The nomination carries more weight than it might first appear to carry. The Maureen O’Donnell Scholarship is not awarded for sitting the Advanced examinations; it is awarded for distinguishing oneself among the national pool of those who have already earned Gold Medals on them. The Committee names twenty-one scholars and five alternates from that pool each year. To reach the nomination at all is to have already cleared several preceding thresholds: the examination itself, the Advanced level, the Gold Medal, and then selection from among every student in the country who has done the same. That these three students have done so as sophomores and juniors — years before they can accept the award — is the most precise measure available of how far ahead of schedule their formation has placed them.
The record across three years is worth reading as a continuous arc rather than a sequence of separate announcements. In 2024, the program placed its first two nominees: Victoria Gyuyeon Park as a freshman, Hunjae Lee as a sophomore. No program sends freshmen to the Maureen O’Donnell nomination pool by accident. In 2025, five students were nominated — a number that stands, to this program’s knowledge, without common precedent at an institution of this size. Not one of the five was eligible to receive the award. This year, three scholars are nominated. The cohort is smaller than 2025’s, but within it two names — Victoria Gyuyeon Park and Jihan Lee — are appearing in this record for the second consecutive year at the Advanced level.
Consecutive nominations are not automatic, and consecutive nominations at the same level of difficulty are rarer still. The Advanced NLE examinations are tiered: students who have already sat Advanced Prose typically advance to Advanced Poetry; those who have taken Advanced Poetry advance to Advanced Reading Comprehension — the highest examination the NLE offers. Both Victoria Gyuyeon Park and Edward Cha have now reached Advanced Reading Comprehension, the terminal tier. To earn the Gold Medal there is to have exhausted the upward progression the exam makes available. The NLE has no higher examination to offer them. That they should reach that ceiling as sophomores and juniors, and be nominated for the scholarship in the process, is the precise measure of how far ahead of the usual schedule their formation has carried them.
Edward Cha’s nomination requires no lesser acknowledgment for being his first appearance in this list. He arrives here the same year he earned a Perfect Paper on the National Latin Exam — a result that places him, by two separate and independent measures, among the most accomplished Latin students in the country. That such a student should now stand alongside two returning nominees is not coincidence; it is what a serious program looks like when it has been running long enough for its formation to compound.
Maureen O’Donnell taught for thirty-five years and was called mater by her students. The scholarship that carries her name is the NLE’s clearest statement of what it values: not breadth alone, not performance at the middle levels, but command of the Advanced Latin corpus at the highest attainable tier, sustained over years. These three students have answered that standard. We look forward, with no small measure of anticipation, to the years still ahead of them.