This Week's Whiz Kid: Trishorn Plummer Taught Herself Korean

• Name: Trishorn Plummer
• Age: 17
• Grade: 12th
• School: Acorn Community High School
• Accomplishment:  She taught herself Korean at home and became a youth ambassador to Korea through the Korea Society’s Project Bridge program – all while battling lupus and maintaining a 3.9 grade point average. She is also president of her senior class and of the National Honor Society.

Perhaps it was fate.

When Trishorn Plummer was 8 years old, she happened upon a Korean soap opera while channel surfing. She was drawn in by the exoticness of the show and the challenge of trying to figure out what was going on. She started watching them every night, though she never thought about what Asian country they were from.

Four years later, she was helping her favorite teacher, Jennifer Oh, arrange the library after school when she asked her how to say hello in Korean.

“She said ‘An-Young-Ha-Se-Yo.’ I didn’t really think anything of it, and then I heard it on TV and I was just really excited,” Plummer said.  

Acorn, where she was a freshman at the time, doesn’t have Korean classes, but Plummer set upon teaching herself with the help of a Korean-English dictionary her mother bought her, the soap operas, and some other teach-yourself-Korean books, which she studied about three hours every night after finishing her homework. She didn’t take any Korean classes because they were too expensive, she said.

The interest in Korean helped Plummer escape a bleaker part of her high school experience – her diagnosis of lupus, an autoimmune disease, when she was 13.

“I was always at the doctor. I would go there and I would know everyone at the hospital,” she said.

The disease made her hair start to fall out, and the steroids doctors put her on made her face swell and caused her to gain 30 pounds, all right before she started high school, where she knew almost nobody.

“I had really low self esteem,” she said. “I didn’t know how to explain it to people.”

During her first two years she missed school often and felt isolated from her classmates. At the end of her sophomore year she explained to her classmates what was going on and recruited 10 of them for a lupus walk.

The medication got the disease and her weight under control. Junior year she became a youth ambassador to Korea, which involved a preparation class on Korean history, language and culture twice a week. The six-month experience culminated in a 10-day study tour in Korea.

Plummer hopes to go to Wesleyan or Brown next year, major in Asian Studies, spend a year in Korea after college and then teach Korean in a U.S. high school along with English literature.

Key to awesomeness:  “She’s an extremely hard working, diligent and passionate student. And when she puts her mind to something, she gives 110 percent,” said Ben Honoroff, Acorn’s assistant principal for humanities.

But Plummer has her own explanation.

“I just kind of fell in love with it,” she said. “Being different, taking on something that’s challenging, (and) never giving up even though sometimes I get frustrated.”

 Know a Prospect Heights whiz kid we should feature? E-mail amy.clark@patch.com.