This June, while most high schoolers were easing into summer, two Western Reserve Academy students packed their bags, fine-tuned their presentations and traveled to College Park, Maryland — not for vacation, but to make WRA history.
Yunwoo Choi ’26 and Victor Wang ’26, two students in Social Science faculty Sarah Horgan’s College Level U.S. History and Government class, earned the rare distinction of competing in the National History Day (NHD) contest, a sprawling, scholarly affair that brings together the best minds across the country and beyond. Held annually at the University of Maryland, the contest marks a culmination of months (sometimes years) of research, writing, revision and, perhaps the most daunting of all, judging.
For their part, Choi and Wang each tackled different facets of the contest’s 2025 theme: Rights and Responsibilities in History, a prompt that might give pause to even the steadiest of grad students. Choi crafted a website exploring the life and legacy of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, framing his work as “Igniting a United World to Address Segregation and Encourage Voting Rights for All.” Wang opted for the traditional research paper, turning his lens to the history of inclusivity in pharmaceutical trails with “The Dawn of Diverse Drug Clinical Trials — Rights and Responsibilities in Science Research.”
Both projects advanced through local and state competitions in Ohio — no small feat — and earned them a ticket to the national stage. There, in a sea of 3,000 student-historians from all 50 states and several U.S. territories and international schools, Wang’s paper continued to stand out. He advanced to the final judging round and secured a place among the Top Ten. This is the highest finish in WRA’s history of NHD participation.
“We’ve sent students to nationals for the past five years, but this is the first time one of our own has broken into that upper echelon,” said Horgan. “This is a landmark moment.”
Landmark, yes. But not, perhaps, surprising. The NHD contest, widely considered to be the Super Bowl of secondary school history scholarship, demands from its participants a heady mix of intellectual stamina, original thinking and moral clarity. All traits in ample supply on Reserve’s brick paths.
The contest asks more than simply memorizing names and dates. It challenges students to inhabit the minds of those who shaped the past, to interrogate motivations and consequences, and to translate the weight of history into something human. Final projects, ranging from documentaries, exhibits, websites and papers, are judged not only for their accuracy, but for their insight.
In short, not for the faint of heart.
Earlier this year, Horgan stood at the Chapel podium during Morning Meeting to share the news of her students' advancement through this competition and to express her pride and joy in reaction to their heavy mental lifting and intellectual curiosity. Now at the end of this contest, we too see the tremendous work and a kind of scholarly courage in the projects completed by Wang and Choi, by all of our Pioneers who participated in this contest. To spend months immersed in difficult, nuanced material is to develop a relationship with the past and, in doing so, the present.
All of their success is worth celebrating. But more than that, it is worth reading, and remembering. Congratulations, Pioneers!
Click here to review Choi’s website.
Click here to read Wang’s paper.
