David C. Hoyt of West Windsor is the first student at Mercer Community College to receive a Jack Kent Cooke scholarship — $30,000 a year for up to three years.
The award was created by the billionaire philanthropist to ensure that exceptional community college students are able to transfer to the four-year school of their choice. Only 40 students across the country are selected for this prestigious honor annually,
“Perfection is impossible, but it must be striven for nonetheless,” says Hoyt, who does homework on the treadmill and on car trips, and can function well on three to six hours of sleep. Hoyt, who left High School North due to illness, earned his GED. His parents are Charles and Irene Hoyt, president of the Friends of the West Windsor Library.
Hoyt, who maintains a 4.0 GPA, will graduate from Mercer this month with an associate degree in liberal arts. With the goal of being an international diplomat or businessman, he has taken the toughest courses Mercer has including three languages (Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese), honors microeconomics, history, macroeconomics, developmental psychology, calculus, and physics. He is president of the MCCC chapter of the Phi Theta Kappa, the international honor society for high achieving community college students, and is also president of Alpha Mu Gamma, the international language honor society. He is past editor of the college’s student newspaper, the College Voice, for which he earned an award from the New Jersey Collegiate Press Association in the news writing category, and served as co-producer/technical director of MCN Live, the student weekly cable television news show.
“Thank you for giving me this chance,” said Hoyt to the school’s executives. “I believe I have a better chance to accomplish my goals having attended Mercer than if I had gone the regular route through high school and beyond. Mercer was my second chance.”
His return to Mercer College was spurred in part by his work as a lifeguard and swim instructor at the YWCA Princeton, where he worked in the pool with handicapped children and young adults in the YWCA’s Adapted Program. “It did not deter them. I witnessed people performing at their best against seemingly impossible odds,” he said. “By the end of my first class at Mercer, I almost cried, I was so happy to be back.”
He believes he has learned study skills and a work ethic that will never leave him. “I have a little voice that tells me to keep on going,” Hoyt says. “I am willing to sacrifice a lot in pursuit of my dreams.” The application process for the scholarship called for multiple essays, a personal story, and questions about his ambitions and the schools to which he has applied for transfer.
When Hoyt was asked to draw on lessons of history to discuss solutions to world problems he focused on diplomacy. His father had given him a book, entitled “Taiko” that detailed political turmoil in 16th century Japan. The scholar who counseled diplomacy rescued the country and became its ruler. “Diplomacy will be the key at this critical juncture in world history,” said Hoyt. “We will only solve the world’s considerable problems through diplomacy and an ability to understand each other.”
Understanding each other is something Hoyt believes in quite literally. “Not enough Americans can speak a foreign language. I believe language is vital to our future.”
Recognizing the rising role of China, Hoyt has decided to focus intently on his mastery of Chinese. He spent time last summer at Middlebury College in Vermont in an immersion program in Mandarin Chinese and plans to return this June. No English is spoken, and students typically spend five hours in class and nine hours on homework daily. “At the start of the program you couldn’t even tell someone how stressed you were, because we didn’t know the word for that yet,” he says. His first assignment to write an essay in Chinese was the hardest as he had no idea how to start or even if his computer had Chinese language software. By the end of the program, students were nearly fluent — even talking Chinese slang as they let loose on Middlebury’s soccer field. Hoyt says he has even spoken Chinese in his dreams.
Hoyt has set his sights on attending a top university and expects to get word from the colleges he has applied to by mid-May. He plans to pursue a dual major in international relations and economics and a minor in Asian studies.
