Emily Patton has been selected as one of four 2024 Portz Scholars
photo by UTC
For the first time in the history of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Honors College, one of its students has been rewarded in the National Collegiate Honors Council’s annual competition for outstanding undergraduate honors papers.
Emily Patton, a May 2024 graduate and Brock Scholar who earned bachelor’s degrees in environmental science and humanities: international studies, has been selected as one of four 2024 Portz Scholars—one of the most prestigious honors for undergraduate students in honors programs across the country.
“The thesis is a long-term project; it’s two semesters of work, and students are often creating substantial bodies of literature that require them to mine through endless primary and secondary sources to do extensive lab work,” said Honors College Associate Dean Will Kuby, the director of the college’s thesis program.
“To be able to put that much effort into it and to write something that you’re proud of is a prize in and of itself, but to see something go on and be recognized for its quality shows the amount of intellectual engagement Emily was able to put forth.”
Ms. Patton’s journey to becoming a Portz Scholar is deeply connected to her personal ties to the Appalachian region—which she explored in her honors thesis titled “The Gavel and the Camera: Environmental Law and Photojournalism’s Relationship to Appalachian Identity.”
“My grandfather (Jim Patton) was born in Harlan, Ky., and I just grew up on stories of his family,” said Ms. Patton, a 2020 graduate of Signal Mountain High School. “His father was a miner, and I grew up listening to stories about coal towns and the lives of miners—how everything from the store to the stamps was controlled by the coal companies.
“He would always talk about how he moved from Kentucky to Grundy County, Tennessee, when he was in high school or middle school—and he always talked about how his dad never let him go in the mines. My family and the opportunities that I’ve had … would have been a lot different if his dad didn’t protect him in that way.”
Portz Scholars receive a stipend and present their papers at the NCHC national conference taking place in late October in Kansas City, Mo.