Pictured: Andrew Higgins, Stephanie Hernandez, Estefani Garcia, and Yahir Garcia.
By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
As in 2022, and 2024, scholars of Honors Northeast have won the top student prize of the East Texas Historical Association (ETHA). For their panel, “Areas where the Amnesia of Modern Texas is more Acute,” four NTCC sophomores took home $200 apiece. They had the best student panel at the association’s plenary fall conference. The meeting occurred in Nacogdoches, 2-4 October at the Fredonia Hotel.
Honors Director, Dr. Andrew Yox noted: “There were two student panels that were accepted for this conference. Besides NTCC, there was a group from the University of Houston. Other years, teams of students from Stephen F. Austin, and Texas A&M at College Station, have won the Portia Gordon. Thus, this is a true intervarsity award that again shows the exceptional results of teamwork within an NTCC-centered community. We managed to have exceptional young scholars such as Estefani Garcia, Yahir Garcia, Stephanie Hernandez, and Andrew Higgins. Because of our supporters inside and outside the college, these students have already made over twenty-five scholarly presentations of their research, and they have collectively won over ten awards. They have been extensively mentored and supported. Estefani Garcia is our college’s current Chitsey Scholar, Yahir Garcia our Russell Mowery Scholar, Stephanie Hernandez, our Texas Heritage National Bank Scholar, and Andrew Higgins, our James and Elizabeth Whatley Scholar.
The three essays for the panel were all developed in the fall of 2024 in the Texas history portion of the honors BioTex seminar at NTCC. Hernandez’s work on Tejano murals has won a record now of four intervarsity awards as well as a poster award at NTCC’s McGraw-Hill contest. It is the pioneering story of Mexican-American public art in Texas. Into the limelight as well now is Estefani Garcia’s work on Mary Kay as the Queen of Motivation. Garcia argues that Kay succeeded on her own terms, compiled and internalized a winsome motivational strategy, and created a corporate culture of motivation that touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of women around the world. Finally, Yahir Garcia, who spearheaded NTCC’s Webb Chapter Award last spring in Houston, spoke on toxicity and taxation. He referred both to the toxic tax of pollution—a theme of last year’s honors’ film, but also the tax of waste that can be minimized in student film initiatives.
