Twenty Honors students from the three main San Jacinto College campuses will travel to Stillwater, Oklahoma on March 23-25 to present their research at the Great Plains Honors Council Conference (GPHCC) at Oklahoma State University.

The GPHCC is an annual gathering open to Honors students, from participating colleges and universities in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, where they present ideas and research with peers from their Honors-level classes under a common theme. This year’s theme is Surviving the Times through Strength, Community, Diversity.

San Jac Honors student Karelia Alexander said her presentation, titled “The Brain of Man and Hand of Machine,” takes a closer look at Bill Joys’ article, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.”

“It started as a requirement for my English class,” Alexander said. “It was only supposed to be an abstract, but I went above and beyond and wrote a five-page essay.”

In addition to Alexander, San Jac students giving oral presentations include: Christian Badillo, Melissa Escamilla, Tess Herrington, Jenniffer Medrano, Margaret Simmons, Amber Spears, Dmitriy Sychev, Romeo Charcas, Jaekob Childress, Evelyn Marshall, Tyler White, Daniel Perdomo, Scarlet Zul, Jeffrey Amie, Huong Ngo, Jorge Montoya, and Jubayer Moyen.

Carlos Argueta, Naureen Islam, and Dayoung Kim will present in the Non-Competitive Poster section.

At the end of every Honors course, students are required to complete a project that shows they can take the knowledge gained in the classroom and apply it to outside research. In turn, the assignments can be presented at GPHCC.

Professor Pamela Maack, who heads the Honors program on the Central Campus, said a commonly-held misconception is that the difference between an Honors course and a regular college-level class is the level of difficulty. She argued the variance goes deeper.

“Most people believe that Honors classes are harder classes and that they are more academically challenging and that’s part of it,” Maack said. “But at the heart and soul of them, as they’re written in a national perspective, the way that they function is by allowing students to do original research.”