Two graduating seniors were awarded the College’s top academic honors at McDaniel’s May 19 Commencement ceremony. Jeffrey Zamostny received the Argonaut Award, given to the senior with the highest grade point average, and Kaitlin McLean and Zamostny each received an Edith Farr Ridington Phi Beta Kappa Writing Award for the most well-written papers.

Zamostny, a Spanish major from Mount Airy, Md., earned a more-than-perfect 4.225 GPA.

Kaitlin McLean, from Hockessin, Del., is a Biology and Biochemistry major who won a Ridington award for her paper entitled “Duplication and Junction Fragment Analysis in Pelizaeus-Merzbacher Disease Indicates a Coupled Homologous and Nonhomologous Repair Mechanism.” Based on laboratory analysis of the DNA of a rare genetic disease, McLean created her own model for how the mutated gene is rearranged.

McLean will attend medical school at Penn State’s Hershey campus and plans to become an emergency-room doctor.

Zamostny won the Ridington award for his paper titled: “Memoria, tiempo e historia: Novelas de Chacel, Goytisolo y Cercas.” The paper focused on how each of three Spanish novels written during three generations (published 1945, 1966 and 2001) weaves a theme of memory into the plot, whether that theme occurs on a personal or national level (i.e. the Spanish Civil War).

After being accepted to numerous graduate programs at nationally acclaimed universities, including the University of Pennsylvania and University of Virginia, Zamostny has accepted a full scholarship to continue his studies in Spanish at the University of Kentucky – Louisville, which has a strong program in his specialty, modern Spain.

The Argonaut Award was named for the College’s original honor society founded in 1935 and superseded by formation of a Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1980.

Established by the College’s Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) chapter in memory of Edith Farr Ridington, a longtime faculty member, the writing award honors her work as a charter member and historian of the Delta of Maryland Chapter of McDaniel.