Jio Kim: Questions in the Units of the Unknown

Jio Kim has a phrase she made up herself: she likes, she says, to question things in the units of the unknown. It is a fitting description of someone who reads as constantly and as widely as she does, and who has spent the last year and a half turning that same appetite toward Latin specifically.

She arrived at Emerson Latin having already studied some Latin elsewhere, and the training here moved quickly. Last summer, she completed Intensive Latin, the academy's accelerated track, covering in a single summer roughly three years of the grammar and reading a typical high school sequence spreads across separate school terms. The pace asked a great deal of her. She met it.

That foundation showed up almost immediately in a role of real responsibility. From October of last year through this March, Jio served as captain of Emerson Latin's own varsity team in a national Latin and classical humanities tournament, leading her six teammates through five demanding rounds of competition against a field of 156 boarding, classical, private, and public schools across the United States. Under her captaincy, the team advanced to the National Super-Regional Round, placing in the top 20 percent of the nation and finishing as one of only two international teams in the entire field, the only one representing South Korea. In the tournament's fifth and most difficult round, the team recorded the highest single-round score in the program's history.

Her favorite line in Latin comes from the Aeneid: mens agitat molem, mind moves matter. She reads it as a kind of argument for why Latin still matters at all: some things cannot be proven or measured, only described, and Latin, more than most languages she has encountered, seems built for exactly that work. Ask her about a specific breakthrough in her own studies and she does not point to the tournament. She points instead to a quieter moment during her AP Latin preparation, when she sat down with an unfamiliar passage and worked through it entirely alone, without a class or a teacher beside her, and found that she could. That was the moment, she says, she actually believed the training had taken.

Jio also serves as president of her own school's Latin Club and leads a committee within it besides. Ask her classmates and they will tell you the same thing in different words: she is the one who has already read the book you were about to recommend to her. That habit of mind, restless and genuinely curious, is exactly what a captain needs, and exactly what her own motto describes. She is still finding the units of the unknown. She has simply gotten very good, this past year, at leading others into them too.