Jihan Lee's Telescope and Kaleidoscope

For a long stretch of his time in Caesar's De Bello Gallico, Jihan Lee translated the way most students do at that stage: word by word, reorganizing after the fact, correcting when the sense came out wrong, which it usually did. Then came the passage on Ambiorix's betrayal. Something in it made him realize that Latin was less an obstacle course than a puzzle, formulaic, almost mathematical, in which recognizing one piece let him predict the shape of the rest. He stopped translating word by word and started reading.

The record since has been unusually steady. This year he earned a Perfect Paper at the Advanced Poetry level of the National Latin Exam, the highest distinction the exam confers, following Gold at the Advanced Prose level in 2025 and Gold at the Beginning level in 2024. In the 2026 SCRIBO Latin writing competition, his story Aut Mors aut Mendacium earned Summa Cum Laude and was selected for publication; the year before, he had placed with a Bronze Award. The National Latin Exam Committee has nominated him for the Maureen O’Donnell Scholarship in two consecutive years, 2025 and 2026, an honor that in the ordinary course goes to students in their senior year. He was inducted, this year as well, into the National Latin Honor Society.

A High Commendation in the Classics category of the Minds Underground Essay Competition, where he was the only entrant from Korea to place this year, accompanies these, along with two Gold Medals in the National Latin Vocabulary Exam and a place representing South Korea in the NJCL Latin League's run to the Super-Regionals.

Distinction has not confined itself to Latin. For two years running, Jihan has represented Korea on the national debate team, the KWSDC, where the patience of the periodic sentence finds a second use at the lectern.

The habit of mind has traveled well beyond the classroom. Jihan was selected for Archaeospain's summer program, joining a working excavation of the Roman fortress of Pulpon, near Cuenca, Spain, where the Latin he had learned to read on the page could be read again in stone.

He describes Latin as both a telescope and a kaleidoscope: a lens into ancient history, philosophy, and culture, and a wonder worth staring into on its own terms. He plans to major in Classics.