Submitted by Dr. Andrew Yox, NTCC Honors Director
For the eleventh year in a row, students of Honors Northeast have presented scholarly work at the annual meeting of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC). Scholars, (Left to Right) Jazmin Garcia, Jordan Whelchel, Hannah Dickson, Matthew Chambers, and Rhylie Anderson maintained NTCC’s tradition, bringing to the fore, oft-revised-and -performed work, that averaged four public presentations apiece before coming to Boston for the 7-11 November conference.
The competition to appear in the 53rd annual NCHC meeting was intense. The NCHC program committee accepted 133 General Session panel proposals as well as 300 student poster presenters. The vast majority of student presenters were juniors and seniors from university honors programs and colleges, with less than 5 percent representing community college honors programs. Rhylie Anderson, Matthew Chambers, Hannah Dickson, and Jazmin Garcia qualified for the poster presentations, and engaged a more-or-less constant line of questioners and judges for a two-hour session on Friday morning. For the fifth year in a row, Honors Northeast also initiated a successful General Session at the NCHC, and this year shared the rostrum with the honors college of Valparaiso University, Christ College, in Indiana. The panel was entitled, “The Spaceport: Lifting and Uplifting the Honors Experience with a Dramatic Production.” Here, Jordan Whelchel, the director of the recent Honors Northeast film on Barbara Conrad, and Matthew Chambers—another member of the executive film committees of 2017, and 2018, joined Chair Dr. Andrew Yox, and Valparaiso Honors Professor, Dr. Jennifer Prough for a look at the possibilities of staging special performances. The NTCC group provided segments of their films, now on YouTube. Dr. Prough explained the unique features at Christ College where the students not only write the script, and stage the action, but compose and perform their own one-hour-plus musical
In addition to the formal presentations, NTCC Honors Professor, Dr. Melissa Fulgham, served as a NCHC Poster Judge. Hannah Dickson (shown presenting her Boe-Award-winning project in Boston below) attended the meeting of the Great Plains Honors Council as the Student Representative. It was the fourth time in eleven years that an NTCC Presidential Scholar served at the top student post of the GPHC.
Two anonymous donors and long-term friends of Honors Northeast widened the out-of-the-ordinary dimensions of the Boston trip by giving each honors student, an extra $100 in spending money. The NTCC group had dinner their first night with Hannah Peacock, formally of Mount Pleasant, a Marketing Specialist at Jebbit, a dynamic internet startup that has gained 100 new employees in five years. Peacock, who along with her sister, Emily, had participated in previous honors films, presented each member of the group with authentic teas resembling the brands thrown overboard in the Boston Tea Party of 1773. The group also explored Boston’s Freedom Trail, the Boston Commons, and the Chinatown District.
