Dr. John Zubizarreta, a recently retired expert in honor education, once summarized what he believed was the most important insight of his career. “Conscientious mentoring” he said, was the “key to transformative experiences in education.” This year’s 17th annual McGraw Hill Poster Contest at the Whatley Foyer on 9 May 2025 again attested to the importance of such academic counseling. All of the fifteen student participants this year received extensive one-on-one professionalization time or correspondence with faculty. In general, those who performed better, received even more, and most importantly, were willing to make the time to receive more mentoring. In recent years, virtually no one even shows up to the contest, despite its lucrative prizes, without an extensive honors seminar, independent study, or special research experience with a professor who is willing to go above-and-beyond with both encouragement and help. The contest this year, as with previous regional contests this semester, again attested to the fact that oneon- one mentoring remains alive and well at NTCC. Though the scores and enthusiasm of the community judges dipped slightly this year, their feedback again indicated that they were impressed with the creativity and expertise of NTCC’s honors students in their realms of interest. The NTCC trustee from Morris County, Sondra Fowler, noted that it should “not even be called a poster contest, as it is more a competition involving ideas.” Number one this year, in a surprise, was the first-semester honors student Emma Mendoza. She leveraged a passionate interest she had with sewing, with a history 1301 paper requirement in an eight-week course, and an honors professor willing to guide a five-page assignment into a thirteen-page essay. Mendoza argued that though the Singer Sewing Machine of the 1850s allowed women to sew a man’s shirt fourteen times faster than before, society simply compensated by wearing more clothes at once and successively. Mendoza, winning the first prize and $400, also showed on her poster how other promising new technologies failed to provide promised time dividends. Expected new worlds of leisure have never arrived.
