Northeast Texas Community College Presidential Scholars, Jessica Velazquez of Mount Vernon and Angelica Fuentes of Mount Pleasant were recently awarded Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Undergraduate Transfer Scholarships. These prestigious awards cover up to $40,000†annually at a university of the student?s choice for up to three†years. Only†75 students were selected from more than 2,000 top applicants in a very competitive process for this national honor.

?Each year†I am impressed by our students? successes.

Kassandra V. Martinez, a Northeast Texas Community College Honors Scholar, and Tanika Santos, a member of the NTCC Women?s Soccer Team have become the first winners of the Bonnie Spencer Awards for superior essays in history.† Spencer, an alumna of Northeast, and the leader of NTCC?s first history club in 2003, established the fund that awards the prizes. She also read the submissions, and helped select the winners.

Northeast Texas Community College held its ninth†annual McGraw-Hill Poster contest Friday, April 29. The event was held in the foyer of the Whatley Center for the Performing Arts and featured research by 20 of NTCC?s most decorated scholars. The contest has become an annual test of creative research in Northeast Texas, funded in part by the McGraw-Hill Corporation, and judged by friends of the college, and Honors Northeast.

Northeast Texas Community College student William Austin Jones was recently named the winner of the 2015-2016 Chitsey Award, granted annually to the student of Honors Northeast who most exceeded expectations. Jones has impressed all four of the first-year honors seminar professors for his proactive academic work, and commitment to excellence. He was the winner of the freshman-sophomore division of the Great Plains Honors Council poster contest in the Behavioral Sciences for his poster on quasi-criminality.

Honors Northeast, the honors program of Northeast Texas Community College, recently continued its tradition of success among its peers in the Great Plains Honors Council with the poster awards of William Jones and Gabriela Quezada.†Jones won the behavioral science division of those with fewer than 60 hours of college completed, while the NTCC sophomore, Gabriela Quezada, won in the professional division for those with more than 60 hours.††NTCC won two of the six poster awards given at the meeting.†††Jones and Quezada both were awarded $50 prizes.

Some 50 honors colleges and programs,

Northeast Texas Community College Presidential Scholar, Jessica Velazquez, was recently published in the 2016 issue of a statewide academic journal.†Touchstone, the annual publication of the Texas State Historical Society, chose Velazquez?s essay†?Farm Life in Transition? as one of the collegiate articles featured this year.

Her essay surveys agriculture in five counties in Texas from 1930 to 1960: Brazoria, Denton, Hidalgo, Lubbock, and Titus.† Even with each county representing a different section of Texas agriculture, Velazquez found some important similarities.

Northeast†Texas Community College Honors scholars†walked away from the 2016 March meeting of the Webb auxiliary of the Texas State Historical Association with a total of five cash prizes - more than ever before in the history of NTCC.

The most unprecedented win was Presidential Scholar, Hector Zuniga?s first-place ($400) prize for his 15-page essay on former Texas Governor, William Hobby. Though NTCC?s Carlos Mendez, and Noah Griffin have won first place Caldwells before on the state level, Zuniga won in the senior division, among those with 60 hours or more.

Dr. Andrew Yox, Northeast Texas Community College's Honors Director, recently reached a climactic moment of his †twenty-year career in Northeast Texas.

On March 4 in Irving, The Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) awarded Yox the Mary Jon and J.P. Bryan Leadership in Education Award, a citation that came with a $5,000 prize.† It is the top financial award granted each year by the TSHA, open to university and college educators in history throughout the state.

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