Friends of Franklin Library Award Scholarship

From left are Lisa Rein, Letha Hemingway, Ji-Yann Chin, Maria Lucier, and Laura Hogan.

Ji-Yann Chin has won The Friends of Franklin Library Scholarship in Memory of Wilma Winters. A 2023 graduate of Franklin High School, Ji-Yann recently received $1,000 toward the cost of a college education.

Students were asked to write an essay about what gives them hope for the future. In her essay, Ji-Yann wrote about some of the frustrations she felt growing up in Franklin. “Nobody pronounced my name right. … and Lunar New Year was never acknowledged. But over time, this all changed."

At Franklin High, for example, several teachers asked Ji-Yann to email them voice memos so that they could learn to properly pronounce her name. “The fact that so many teachers are using technology as a tool to pronounce their students’ names correctly gives me hope for the future,” Ji-Yann wrote in the winning essay.

Ji-Yann, a first-year student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, is studying both microbiology and public health.

The Friends of Franklin Library, an independent, non-profit organization committed to supporting the Franklin Public Library, established its scholarship program in 2014. The annual scholarship is part of several efforts undertaken to honor the late Wilma Winters, a longtime Franklin resident and library supporter. Winters, who had a long career in higher education, worked for many years as a librarian, including at Boston University Medical School and Harvard’s School of Public Health. She spent her retirement years volunteering at the Franklin Public Library.

The scholarship will be awarded again this year to a member of the Class of 2024.