By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
The Jack Kent Cooke (JKC) Foundation has distinguished itself in recent years, for not only granting some of the most generous scholarships in the world, but for granting them to students at different levels, from high school to graduate school. NTCC has fared exceptionally well with these scholarships, winning eleven transfer scholarships since 2010. A lesser known fact is that many of these transfer winners have turned around and won a second Jack Kent Cooke foundation scholarship for work in graduate school.
Daniel Landaverde, an NTCC Jack Kent Cooke winner in 2020, has just won his second Jack Kent Cooke scholarship to attend the MBA program at the University of Texas at Dallas. This scholarship is capped at $75,000 per year, and could be renewed for another year, for a maximum overall allotment of $150,000.
Landaverde, who now works as an associate for Marsh in Dallas, a top-tier global brokerage firm, was an active member of Honors Northeast, the NTCC honors program. While a student here, 2018-2020, he researched and wrote the first published account of the Hispanic community in Mount Pleasant. He was active in NTCC films and presented his work on the Hispanic community at the meetings of the Great Plains Honors Council, and National Collegiate Honors Council. Nationally, he also won the 2019 Leaders of Promise Award of Coca Cola and Phi Theta Kappa.
NTCC Honors Director, Dr. Andrew Yox, who wrote JKC reference letters for Landaverde both in 2019, and 2024, notes that Landaverde was perhaps the most notable “stop-on-a-dime” success story in the history of NTCC. He struck me initially as someone retro, like Bernardo in West Side Story, honorable, streetwise, and forthright. But he won our 2019 Chitsey Award as the honors student who most exceeded expectations, and went on from there to excel in all areas. Landaverde’s greatest accomplishments have also occurred, it seems to me, during times that he was overemployed.”
To date at least five other NTCC alumni have won second Jack Kent Cooke Scholarships—Stephani Calderon, Alicia Cantrell, Brenda Godoy, Clara Ramirez, and Jessica Velazquez.
Anyone interested in acquiring an offprint of Landaverde’s essay on the Mount Pleasant Hispanics should contact Dr. Yox at ayox@ntcc.edu.
