National History Day award honors senior

RuthieBarrett

Picture this: It’s mid-January of your junior year and you are up late at night adding the finishing touches to your National History Day (NHD) project. The seniors know, as most students will learn through their time at Marian, that the project is one of the most stressful and challenging projects of all. Days of research, pages of writing and hours of editing go into making this project the best it can be. 

The NHD project is an opportunity for students across the nation to research any historical topic that relates to the chosen theme that year and write a report or produce a documentary on the topic. At Marian, this project is assigned during the junior year history classes. Students work on this project for four months in addition to the regular coursework.

The NHD theme for 2023 was “Frontiers in History: People, Places, Ideas.” Marian girls took many different directions with this theme, from researching about the development of the Polio vaccine, to the influence of McDonald’s on American culture. 

At the end of the project, juniors were given the option to enter their projects into the district level competition, which occurred on March 3, 2023. Before the competition, a panel of judges read the papers and watched the documentaries, then, on the day of competition, the judges had questions prepared for students to answer about their projects. 

Marian girls did very well at the district competition, and four girls advanced to the next level, which is state. The state champion of this year’s NHD was Marian’s very own, Sofia Torres-Salvador ‘24. 

As a result of winning the state contest, Torres-Salvador was also invited to the national competition at the University of Maryland, College Park, which occurred from June 10–15, 2023. 

Torres-Salvador’s paper on the Bracero Program was judged along with hundreds of other projects. She was able to compete against students who advanced to the highest level from all over the nation. 

The Bracero Program was created in 1942 and allowed millions of Mexican workers to work legally in the U.S. on short term contracts. Torres-Salvador said she focused on how “the program created a frontier in our understanding of present-day agricultural immigrant labor, settlement patterns within the U.S., immigration laws and how the two decades it was in effect ultimately worked as a catalyst for the creation of modern-day xenophobia against Latin American immigrants.”

At the end of the contest, awards were given to outstanding students and their projects. Sofia received the Latino American History Prize, which is “given in recognition of demonstrated excellence in the study of Latino-American history,” according to the National History Day website. 

Torres-Salvador says her biggest takeaway from this experience is that “although I don’t want to pursue a career in history, I can find things I enjoy about everything I learn,” and ended with stating “No desdeñes el conocimiento. No sabes cuando lo vas a necesitar,” or “Do not disdain knowledge. You never know when you’ll need it.”