By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
The two top winners of the 2022 McGraw Hill Poster Contest at the Whatley Foyer in May received a free trip, ticket and lunch, 28 July, to the Texas Shakespeare Festival in Kilgore, Texas. Together with Honors Director Dr. Andrew Yox, Skylar Fondren, and Victor Diaz saw Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew in an afternoon production.
Fondren and Diaz finished first and second in the May poster contest at NTCC that emphasizes scholarly creativity. Fondren’s poster examined the making of a news desert in Northeast Texas. Diaz’s work concerned a problematic interaction between time spent on social media sites, and student GPAs.
Fondren and Diaz not only excelled last year in scholarship at NTCC. They will be returning this fall as on-campus leaders. Fondren is the director and screen play writer of this year’s honors film on Minnie Fisher Cunningham, the leader of the remarkably effective Texas suffragette movement, 1915-20. Diaz will be chairing two panel presentations featuring NTCC scholars in the fall, in Nacogdoches and Dallas.
Dr. Andrew Yox notes: “we are looking forward to another great year at NTCC, and why not, when we have such accomplished student leaders as Fondren, and Diaz?!”
Fondren was homeschooled and is a journalism major from Avinger. Her work on the news desert also made her a winner of a 2022 Britt Award of the Great Plains Honors Council. She is the daughter of John and Holly. Diaz graduated from Mount Pleasant High School as an award-winning performer in Color Guard, and a top student in Spanish and math. He is the son of Victor Hugo Diaz and Marciana Herrera.
