Top graduate and undergraduate awards presented at Commencement

Three top student awards were revealed at McDaniel’s May 19 Commencement ceremony.

Rebecca Ann Debinski of Sykesville, Md., won the Argonaut Award for achieving the highest cumulative grade-point average, and Jared Michael Wilmer of Westminster, Md., received the Edith Farr Ridington Writing Award for the best senior paper.

Rebecca Ann Debinski, a Spanish major with a minor in Elementary Education, earned a 4.00 grade point average in her entire completed course of study. She graduates summa cum laude with departmental honors in Spanish. Debinski also received The Maria Leonard Senior Book Award, The Frank and Margaret Malone Award for Excellence in a Foreign Language and The Michael and Polly Beaver Award for Excellence in Education.

Debinski graduates a College Scholar and a Global Fellow. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa national honor society as well as Kappa Delta Pi international honor society in Education and Phi Sigma Iota international honor society in foreign language. Consistently achieving Dean’s List throughout her college career, she is also a member of Alpha Lambda Delta national honor society for first-year students.

Her professors applaud her passion for learning, whether it’s film, culture, history, literature or language she approaches the topic with the same zeal.

“Rebecca’s curiosity, compassion and genuine interest in the world and those around her feeds her learning and will surely be infused in all that she teaches the many students whose lives she will touch after she leaves McDaniel,” said her Global Fellows’ advisor, Spanish professor Amy McNichols.

Recently named a Maryland Teacher of Promise, Debinski completed student teaching in a second-grade classroom in Eldersburg Elementary School. She has excelled in both elementary and Spanish teaching practicums as well as various semester-long practicums in schools with diverse strengths and needs. 

Debinski designed an independent studies course to bring together what she learned in her Spanish courses and in Global Fellows to create a culture curriculum for elementary school students.

“It was clear to me that she was applying best practices she had learned in Education,” said McNichols, who also serves as associate dean of McDaniel’s International and Intercultural Program. “She thinks through all that she does to extraordinary detail, and the undercurrent is always her love for learning and teaching what she learns.”

When invited to present her original capstone research and her work in senior seminar at a professional conference, Debinski opted to present her work in Spanish.

“Presenting in Spanish is a daunting task for a non-native undergraduate student,” said McNichols. “Still, her presentation was exceptionally articulate, well-organized and rich in content.”

During her years at McDaniel, she served as captain of the cross country team, leader in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and a member of Heroes Helping Hopkins, which supported the Believe in Tomorrow Children’s House in Baltimore. She collaborated with McDaniel professor Mark Rust and a small group of students to provide interactive instruction in several deaf schools in the Dominican Republic.

Jared Michael Wilmer, who graduates a History major with Departmental Honors in History, earned the top writing award for his History capstone paper, “An Aristocratic Worldview: Persuasive Stoic Language in Tacitus’ Annals.” The paper and research it represents combine Wilmer’s study of the Latin text of the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus with the principles of Roman Stoic philosophy to argue that Tacitus was addressing his history of the early Roman Empire to a specific audience — the Roman aristocracy.

“History capstone papers rarely open up an entirely new approach to the work of a well-known historian, nor are they almost ready for publication,” said Donna Evergates, Wilmer’s advisor and McDaniel professor of History and Classics. “Jared’s paper is the exception.”

Through close critical analysis of the text of the Annals, Wilmer shows, according to Evergates, that rather than writing to present a negative view of the Empire’s first period and certain emperors, as several scholars have argued, Tacitus was providing a moral framework for the aristocracy, offering them a model for how and how not to behave in order to maintain lives of virtue and excellence,.

The paper, completed under the direction of History professor Jakub Zejmis, discusses the fact that after centuries of sharing power during the Roman Republic, the Roman aristocracy had to adapt “to a significant new role — one of both authority and servitude” under the one-man-rule of the Julio-Claudian emperors. 

“Tacitus’ use of the loaded terms misericordia, miseratio, and pudor (pity, compassion and shame) in describing the actions of emperors would have resonated with aristocrats who were well versed in Stoic rhetoric,” Evergates said. “Tacitus’ use of Stoic terminology, Jared writes, is ‘similar to the modern usage of the political tactics of loaded language and moral framing.’”

A member of Phi Alpha Theta history honors society, Wilmer worked for non-profits and founded a non-profit supporting mental illness awareness and education prior to entering McDaniel as a transfer student in the spring of 2017. His professors applaud the qualities he brings to their classrooms.

“As a non-traditional student, Jared brings to his classes a unique perspective that he is always willing to share,” said History professor Bryn Upton. “His insightful comments and questions always keep everyone, students and faculty alike, on their toes.”

During his years at McDaniel, Wilmer has performed with the College Choir, Gospel Choir and Madrigal singers. He plans to travel in France after graduation and then hopes to move to Richmond to take a position with the Red Cross.

The recipient of The Joan Develin Coley Award for Excellence in Education is Hannah Nichole Cook of Hanover, Pa., who earned a master’s degree in the Reading Specialist: Literacy Leadership graduate program.

Since 2012, Cook has taught fifth grade at Baresville Elementary School in the South Western School District in Hanover, Pa., where she also attended elementary school. She is a member of the Alpha Chi national college honor society, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the Keystone State Reading Association. She graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and a minor in special education from York College of Pennsylvania in 2011.

This summer, she will serve as a mentor to the reading specialist students in the McDaniel College Reading Clinic, a comprehensive four-week Title I summer school program providing reading and writing assistance to elementary school-aged students in partnership with Carroll County Public Schools.