The top two students at OCTECHS this year, Ashley Manquero and Jenifer Lopez Martinez, were both aiming for the top spots during their high school years and even before.
“… I had a vision of myself on stage,” she said.
“… It’s actually coming true and it is like a big dream,” 18-year-old Manquero added.
OCTECHS graduation is at 6 p.m. May 20 at the Odessa College Sports Center.
Manquero and Lopez Martinez have also enjoyed being students at the early college high school, which allowed them to earn an associate degree and their high school diploma.
Manquero will get her associate degree in business leadership with an emphasis on management from Odessa College. She will graduate from OC during ceremonies scheduled for 6 p.m. May 13 and 10 a.m. May 14 in the Ector County Coliseum.
Lopez Martinez will receive an associate degree in criminal justice.
Both have found OCTECHS a beneficial place to go to high school.
“I think that it allows large opportunities for students who otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to seek higher education. It gives them that step forward that they need to decide what they want to do after school, or maybe if they want to go into other other fields that are not in education. They get to explore that,” Manquero said.
Manquero plans to attend Bowdoin College on a full scholarship.
She has five siblings and plans to come back to Odessa.
Asked what drove her, Manquero said, she thinks it was her mother.
“She’s outrageously ambitious,” Manquero said. And she’s also doing it for her siblings.
Lopez Martinez, 18, plans to attend UTPB and plans to study biology, specifically the pre-med track, to become a pediatrician.
She said she didn’t think too much about the top 10 until the end of her freshman year when it was announced.
“Back then, I was valedictorian and I realized that I wanted to maintain it for the following years …,” Lopez Martinez said.
She added that if there was competition between her and the other top students.
“It was a healthy competition to help each other out. There was nothing toxic about it,” Lopez Martinez said.
She has a 10-year-old brother and younger cousins who say they want to be like her, or their parents tell them they are going to follow in Lopez Martinez’ footsteps.
Lopez Martinez said she pursued criminal justice at first because she wanted to fight for justice for everyday people and she specifically wanted to be a forensic scientist.
Earning her associate degree will help her move through college faster. Having already taken some college courses, she said it has prepared her for going to a university and what it will take to get through.
Lopez Martinez said it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to stay in the top echelon of students.
Sometimes you may have to make sacrifices, but it’s worth it.
Principal Karl Miller said some of these students have helped and supported him the last couple of years.
“Even as COVID hit, all of these kids showed up. The ones who have made it to graduation, this is probably the best character class that I’ve seen in, I don’t know 20 years, just because they could have quit. They could have had an excuse and it probably could have been legitimate. … Fear, anxiety, stress. You know, the school is not working for me. There could have been all these things for these last two years and these guys didn’t use those excuses. They came, they showed up, they turned things in and they volunteered to help,” Miller said.
“That’s probably the neatest character about this top 10 is that every one of these kids has volunteered to assist others. That’s really cool because they also are some of our leading student tutors,” he added.
