Pictured: Mendoza and Her Award-Winning Poster Presentation. Photo by Laurencio Velazquez.
By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
For the tenth time since the awards began in 2015, an NTCC scholar has won a $100 Britt Award of the Great Plains Honors Council. Emma Mendoza, the Gladys Winkle Scholar of Honors Northeast, from Mount Pleasant, bested all other competitors in the humanities poster division for freshmen and sophomores at the meeting of the Great Plains Honors Council (GPHC). The awards were announced at the closing banquet of the 6-7 March meeting in Kansas City, Kansas.
The GPHC is an association of eighty honors colleges and programs, at both the collegiate and university level, from Nebraska to Texas. It is one of the six major geographical groupings to compose the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC). Every honors program or college in the GPHC had the right to nominate two students to compete in the poster division.
Mendoza, the winner already this semester of a First-Place State Caldwell Award in Irving, came to the conference ready to articulate why her work on Jovita Idar, the woman who appears on a United States quarter, was significant. It helped that she was the winner last spring of the McGraw Hill poster contest at NTCC, and that she had already presented this work at the Mount Pleasant Library in February. Mendoza questioned the 2023 decision of U.S. Mint, celebrated with fanfare in San Antonio, to put Idar on the quarter, or at least to associate an official version of her story with the quarter. The coin, part of the Mint’s 100th-year celebration of Woman’s Suffrage in the United States, has become one of the hottest contemporary keepsakes among coin dealers, as Idar became the first Latina to make a U.S. coin (The Spanish Queen, Isabella, actually also made it on a U.S. Silver Dollar in 1893). However, Mendoza finds many flaws with the official story of Idar, she spotlights the need many had to create a retroactive heroine, and she shows that Idar later in life wrote from more of a Victorian than feminist mindset.
Mendoza came to the conference with five other top NTCC scholars who all presented work as well. Traditionally NTCC has sent its three best student projects from the Fall BioTex Seminar, and the three best from the HuMusic Seminar to the GPHC. NTCC’s Boe nominees, selected for competition in the essay division, included Stephanie Hernandez for her work on flappers of the 1920s, and Andrew Higgins for his work on the contingencies that could have led Texas to have become its own nation in the 1840s. Both presented their papers as part of a panel session. NTCC’s other Britt nominee was Andrew Perez. Perez presented his poster on the creativity of Michael Faraday, James Maxwell, and Nikola Tesla. Rebeca Martinez, meanwhile presented a poster on how Aubrey Hepburn defied female stereotypes in the 1950s. Johnathan Ventura gave a special report on NTCC’s film work with the Caldwell-Award winning, Chicano Thermidor.
Another highlight of the GPHC trip for NTCC was Stephanie Hernandez’s role as the one student of the Council to sit on its executive board, and speak at the plenary meeting. Hernandez was elected to this post last October. She also, like Mendoza, won a Britt Award—but in last year’s meeting in Denton.
The GPHC conference also featured excursions where students could meet their peers from other colleges and universities, and explore facets of culture in the Kansas City. Some went to the famous World War I museum others to the art museum, and a guided urban tour.
Honors Director Dr. Andrew P. Yox notes that “we were especially indebted to Laurencio Velazquez, College Navigator, for transporting the students to this conference. We had two groups that same weekend in the Dallas area, and thus we really needed a driver. The GPHC can be a whirlwind experience, and Velazquez encouraged the students, kept a photographic record, and did everything we would hope a student director could do. In fact, Velazquez, went above and beyond, making a short film of the experience, which highlighted student attainments on this, the 40th anniversary of the college’s founding.”
After the trip Velazquez noted: “it was a privilege to assist Honors Northeast. Dr. Yox and the program are very involved with students' success. I have witnessed this firsthand with my sister's success in winning a Jack Kent Cooke scholarship while at NTCC, which has brought pride to my family. It's a program that offers a lot of opportunities and support. I was glad for the opportunity to support the current students in return.”
Velazquez’s film can be viewed by clicking here,
NTCC scholars, who won two of the six premiere Boe Essay Awards back in 2008, have attended the conference every year since. Altogether, since 2008, NTCC scholars have won ten Boe Awards, ten Britt Awards, and have had ten scholars represent the Council’s students on the executive council. For the NTCC scholars who have won these designations, visit this link.
