By: Dr. Andrew Yox, NTCC Honors Director
In a close vote last summer, State of Texas Webb Society sponsors, and editors of the collegiate journal, Touchstone, elected Neida Perez of NTCC. She was thus chosen to represent the upper-division of in giving a featured presentation at the spring 2024 meeting of the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) at College Station. By “upper-division” the educational wing of the TSHA means students having more than 60 hours. Perez thus will represent a division normally represented by a junior or senior university student in Texas.
Perez’s Caldwell-Award winning article which she will restate concerns the ongoing war Texas has had with microbes. In one of the essay’s memorable lines, Perez notes, “forget Nazis, and Yankees. Microbes have been the greatest long-term enemy of the Lone Star State.” Perez notes that in ignoring modern medicine for some time, and then chasing vice-diseases related to cholesterol and smoking, the Texas establishment has continued to dodge the state’s foremost adversaries. Perez’s essay illustrates that from the terrible yellow-fever epidemics of the nineteenth century, to COVID, and pneumonia in modern times, Texas has lagged in its understanding, and treatment of pathogen-related illnesses.
Perez is the only student in NTCC history to represent the upper-division of Higher Education in a meeting of the Texas State Historical Association. She will give her address on 1 March at the center of the largest non-virtual university in the United States—the Texas A&M Hotel and Conference Center.
Perez is technically an NTCC sophomore who wrote her essay in her first year at NTCC for the BioTex honors seminar. She is a bio-chem major, currently enrolled in Dr. Murphy’s organic chemistry II class, and other high-level math/science courses. She also occupies the top student post of the Great Plains Honors Council, an association of eighty honors programs and colleges from Nebraska to Texas. Honors Director, Dr. Andrew P. Yox, notes that “there are six student leaders of the six regional honors councils in the United States that compose the National Collegiate Honors Council. Of the six, Perez is the only non-university student who has attained that stature. Winning the Caldwell Award last spring, and then having her essay accepted for the Touchstone Journal were important attainments that helped facilitate her election to the executive board of the GPHC last fall.”
Perez’s standing in the GPHC is evident on the leadership page of the website for the Great Plains Honors Council. Perez is a graduate of Mount Pleasant High School, and is the daughter of Luciano and Ana Perez.
Honors Northeast is accepting applications for the 2024-25 school year. The deadline for an optimal scholarship is 1 March. Write ayox@ntcc.edu if you have any questions or would like an application. The free honors film premiere, on the Traveling Features, begins at 7 p.m. at the Whatley Center of the Performing Arts, 23 February.
