By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
The Gladys Winkle Family has empowered six NTCC honors students through the years with a special scholarship for excellence in the Humanities that comes in addition to an institutional honors scholarship. This year’s winner is Mary-Faith Wilson, a star of the HuMusic Seminar last fall before she even entered honors, and this year, one of the top-tier Presidential Scholars of Honors Northeast.
Wilson had a great year at NTCC and looks forward to the coming year as a challenging and animating experience. The winner of the Health Sciences Division of the Red River Symposium scholarly contest last spring, Wilson dominated a field outside her focus on a regional level, though her poster concerned music, a deep love, and more specifically, its effects on patients with Alzheimer. Wilson was a central figure on campus. She was an English tutor in the Humanities building last year, a founding member of the English Club, Sigma Kappa Delta, and is looking forward to being the content editor of NTCC’s literary magazine, Lagniappe. This past July, Wilson won a Texas Star Award with Phi Theta Kappa, and was thus part of the amazing four-award sweep of NTCC at the Denton conference. Recently, we have learned that Wilson has also won national recognition as a Leader of Promise, a scholarship awarded through Coca Cola, and Phi Theta Kappa. This September Wilson will register another first, she will chair a panel at a professional meeting, the fall gathering of the East Texas Historical Association, in Nacogdoches.
Friends of Wilson know that a major motivating facet of her personality and activity is her faith. While keeping current on the piano and with her writing, Wilson is also a Sunday School teacher, and a composer of Christian music, and Christian poetry. She would like to work in the mission field someday.
Wilson notes, “I love the ‘community feel’ at NTCC, the camaraderie among the friends I have made, and warm, mentoring support given by professors.”
Honors Director, Dr. Andrew Yox notes, “It is thrilling how at NTCC we are able to matriculate vanguard students like Wilson each year, students whose records match favorably with our region’s best, both at the universities and community colleges.”
Previous winners of the Winkle Scholarships in honors include Mercedes Collins, John Rodriguez, Israel Perez, Cade Bennet, Hope Kelly, and Maddy Smith. Tom Wilkinson who taught Humanities at NTCC, was a member of this family, and a warm friend of honors and the college. He died in 2021.
Mary-Faith is the daughter of Jeremy and Robin Wilson of Gilmer.
