By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
Two NTCC Presidential Scholars are the recent recipients of $1,250 Gladys Winkle Scholarships. Israel Perez and John Rodriguez, of Mount Pleasant, are the third and fourth recipients of this coveted award in honors. The previous winners were Texas Heritage National Bank Scholar, Mercedes Collins, and Leader of Promise recipient, Courtney Baldwin. The scholarship goes to humanities majors in honors who have a proven record of attainment in a humanities field. It will be applied to their costs this 2021 spring semester.
Both Perez and Rodriguez are double majors. Coming to NTCC last fall with about 40 hours apiece of dual enrollment credit from Mount Pleasant High School, they are leveraging their two-year stay at NTCC to optimize their chances for other awards, as well as to build their skills with writing and research. Both are engineering majors, who have compiled exemplary GPAs in STEM fields. Perez is also majoring in history, while Rodriguez is majoring in Spanish.
Both recipients received academic blankets in their humanities major while at Mount Pleasant High School, Perez in world history, and Rodriguez, three times in Spanish. Both Perez and Rodriguez were major contributors to the Bo Pilgrim film project pursued by NTCC’s Webb Society and Honors. Perez is the key film scholar, who has written a fifteen-page paper on the life of Bo Pilgrim. Rodriguez both acted in the film, and completed his fifteen-page project on Hispanic quietism, an arresting characteristic of Pilgrims’ Hispanic workforce which helped make Pilgrim the leading chicken producer in the world for a brief moment in 2008. The projects of Perez and Rodriguez will be submitted for numerous award and presentation possibilities this spring.
Honors Director, Dr. Andrew Yox notes that, “We at NTCC are so thankful for the matriculation of students like Perez, and Rodriguez here. Both were highly beloved and regarded, top students at Mount Pleasant. Thanks to conversations I have had with Professors Ward and Wilhite, I know that both have an amazing alacrity with calculus and other sciences. They were also indispensable supporters of our Webb-Honors film project on the life of Bo Pilgrim, and one of the key reasons we can hope for a Caldwell group research award this spring.”
Perez is the son of Madai and Samuel Perez; Rodriguez is the son of Loruama and Juan Rodriguez. Both families reside in Mount Pleasant.
