Every year, students from all over California come together to celebrate Latin culture and classical studies at the California Junior Classical League State Convention. This year, University High School and Woodbridge High School co-hosted the 70th CAJCL State Convention at WHS’s campus on March 28 and 29.
In two days, the CAJCL State Convention aims to bring together students from across California through various academic competitions and fun activities. Students can showcase their talents and knowledge while engaging in meaningful interactions with people who share the same passion. However, behind the event’s excitement is a long planning and coordination process to ensure the state convention runs smoothly.
Planning for the 2025 CAJCL State Convention started in September when the team responsible for organizing the convention began discussing logistics and timelines. Organizing such a large-scale event required months of preparation and coordination between many teachers and students; additionally, the CAJCL oversaw the event throughout the planning process.
“The executive board, which was responsible for planning and overseeing convention activities, comprised both Woodbridge and Uni students,” Academic Competitions Chair and senior Hannah Kusumo said. “People from both schools were appointed to head positions, ensuring that both schools could play a large role in leadership.”
One of the first concerns was securing a venue large enough to accommodate everybody who was part of the convention. From there, the event schedule, including academic competitions, workshops, and other social activities, was developed to cultivate community and engagement among the participants.
Apart from the logistics, another crucial aspect of arranging the convention was preparing for competitions, which involved creating exam content and judging criteria, choosing events for community building and recruiting volunteers to help run the convention. Although many of the events stayed the same as previous years, there were also brainstorming sessions to add new events.
“The only thing that changes very much from year to year are the colloquia sessions, where professors from universities in Southern California and Johns Hopkins present lectures and workshops about a topic relating to the classics,” Convention President and senior Christopher Burke said.
With many different positions, proper communication was critical. The people in charge of the organization, especially the two convention presidents, Burke and Michael Corrigan, met weekly in the months leading up to the event to check progress and make adjustments.
“I called each committee group to make a schedule with deadlines to prepare us for [the] convention,” Burke said. “This made sure everyone knew what their responsibilities were, regardless of what school they were at.”
Aside from the student effort, John Conant and Mark Michalak, Latin teachers from WHS and UHS, respectively, were instrumental in supervising the planning process. They rallied everyone together, encouraged everyone to cooperate and helped make the CAJCL State Convention more successful.
“[Mr. Michalak] helped me proofread the prompts I wrote for the essay competition, provided suggestions on how many volunteers would be needed, answered all of my questions and made my tasks feel less daunting,” Kusumo said.
As the convention date neared, the focus shifted to refining the event schedule and ensuring that materials and volunteers were ready to minimize unexpected challenges or changes. Furthermore, one of the most crucial parts of making sure the event ran seamlessly was the amount of help from volunteers.
“We had a lot of student volunteers, but one of the biggest challenges was getting adult volunteers, which we were eventually able to find,” UHS’s JCL President and senior Tak Nishida said.
Most of the final planning was done the day before the CAJCL State Convention began, ensuring that each commissioner knew their responsibilities and that the event would face minimal problems. However, on the days of the convention, there was still a lot of work to be done.
“We had walkie-talkies for instant communication, and the convention presidents mostly ran around putting out fires, including unlocking doors, delivering materials to rooms and dealing with medical issues,” Burke said.
Throughout the process, everyone involved’s well-coordinated effort enabled this year’s CAJCL State Convention to be successful. Whether students were competing in academic events or participating in cultural workshops, the goal was to foster a love of Latin and classical studies while encouraging collaboration and community among participants from various places.
