By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
For NTCC Honors Students, there are three major ways in which leadership not only benefits the recipient, but the whole honors experience. Students can lead in classroom erudition. They can lead in scholarship, generally producing an essay or project that addresses major issues or problems. Finally, they can lead in collective activities that provide services for the community and/or accolades for the larger group. During her first semester in honors last fall, Presidential Scholar, Isabel Tresidder earned the 2024 Dr. Charles B. Florio Award, for her leadership in all three venues.
Anonymous donors have supplied most of the $200 yearly outlays for the leadership award in Honors Northeast. The award recognizes the initiatives of Dr. Charles Florio, who served as President of NTCC for thirteen years, from 1995 to 2008. One of the attainments of his tenure was the establishment of the college’s award-winning honors program. Dr. Florio now lives in retirement in Fort Worth.
In her first semester as an honors student least spring, Tresidder enrolled in both ends of the Biology/Texas History honors seminar. In biology, she helped certify for the first time, various species of tardigrades living in Morris County. In Texas history, she excelled in writing research exercises known in honors as “ideophanies.” Each week for most of the sixteen-week semester, she wrote exercises that equaled or surpassed in length and cohesion the semester-long research-essay of the standard history class at NTCC. In scholarship she was the one student at NTCC to win acceptance into a special research-based class with honors professor, Dr. Chris McAllister. McAllister has commented her work with gopher lice, and California rodent parasites included some intriguing discoveries, and should lead to a publication. Finally, Tresidder was a standout in a collective project, the annual honors film. She conducted serious research last summer at the Lyndon Johnson Presidential library in Austin, and wrote most of the script for the upcoming film, Crude Conquest: Toxification and the Triumph of Big Oil in Texas Politics 1935-1980. “No one in the history of honors,” according to Dr. Andrew Yox, came into the program so young and new to the college, and at the same time willing to write an entire, feature-length film script.”
Tresidder has already presented her research to a regional scholarly community, discussing her film work at the state meeting of the Walter Webb Society last fall in San Antonio. She is a talented pianist, sketch artist, and a biology major. She placed second in the 2024 Northeast Texas Poetry Contest, winning $300 for her poem on wild hogs.
Tresidder resides in Naples and is the daughter of Mark and Helanie Tresidder. The parents were born in South Africa, and the family has lived both in the Dallas area, and east Texas.
