The Witherspoon Institute, based in Princeton, New Jersey, conducts one of the most selective summer seminars available to secondary school students anywhere. Each year, twenty young men and twenty young women are chosen from a worldwide applicant pool to spend a week in close engagement with the foundational texts of the Western philosophical tradition — Plato, Aristotle, and the questions that have never ceased to matter because they bear directly on how one lives. The seminars take place separately; the selection is equally rigorous for both.
Admission is not a reward for academic performance. It requires evidence of something harder to measure: genuine intellectual seriousness, the ability to sustain an argument under questioning, and a readiness to sit with difficult ideas long enough to be changed by them. The application itself demands written essays of philosophical substance — not a personal statement, but a demonstration of the mind at work. Emerson Latin worked closely with both Hyuksun and Seohyeon in preparing for the seminar’s topics and texts, and guided them through the essay process that forms the heart of the application. The Institute selects for a particular quality of mind. We did what we could to ensure that quality was visible on the page.
Hyuksun Kwon was one of twenty young men selected worldwide. Seohyeon Lee was one of twenty young women. That both were admitted in the same year, each on their own merits, from a global field, is a result we record with considerable pride. A student formed in the classical humanities arrives at Plato and Aristotle already acquainted with the questions — already practiced in the kind of careful, patient reading that philosophical argument demands. The Witherspoon Institute evidently found them ready.
At the seminar itself, students are not asked to present prior work. They are placed with serious scholars and serious texts and expected to think — to follow an argument where it leads, to defend a position under questioning, to stay in the difficulty of an idea until something gives. This is not a skill one acquires in a week. It is formed over years of reading carefully and being held accountable for what one says. Both students had that formation. They went to Princeton already prepared.