National Junior Classical League
2021 Convention — William Kim

The National Junior Classical League is the largest classical organization for secondary school students in the world, with a membership drawn from schools across the United States and beyond. Its annual convention is the centerpiece of the year: a multi-day gathering at which students compete in academic events spanning the full breadth of classical study — language, literature, history, mythology, and the derivation of English from Latin and Greek. The competition is demanding not merely because the subject matter is, but because the field is the product of a year’s worth of preparation by some of the most seriously trained classicists among American secondary students.

William Kim entered seven events at the 2021 NJCL Convention. He placed first in four of them.

Three of those victories — Reading, Vocabulary, and Greek Derivatives — are standalone competitions, each testing a distinct and non-trivial dimension of classical knowledge. To win any one of them at the national level is a meaningful distinction. To win all three at once suggests not a student who has prepared for examinations, but one who has genuinely absorbed the language and its inheritance across every register in which it operates.

The fourth event, the Academic Heptathlon, is a different order of achievement. It is a composite competition comprising seven separate disciplines: mythology, Roman history and life, grammar, vocabulary, Latin derivatives, Greek derivatives, and reading comprehension. A student who places first in the Heptathlon has not excelled in one area while compensating in others — the format does not permit that. It requires breadth of preparation and consistency of performance across the entire scope of classical study. Winning it, alongside three individual first-place finishes in the same convention, is the kind of result that does not happen by accident or by cramming. It is the record of a mind that has been genuinely formed.