Amarillo College will celebrate the laudable achievements of nearly 1,200 dedicated scholars at back-to-back commencement ceremonies Friday, May 13 at Hodgetown Stadium in Downtown Amarillo.

Eligible to participate in AC’s Spring Commencement are 912 spring graduates and 282 students who anticipate completing their academic requirements this summer.

Amarillo College is pleased to announce that its Communications and Marketing Department has captured 18 prestigious awards from a pair of elite national organizations known for recognizing excellence in higher education advertising.

The 37th Annual Educational Advertising Awards recognized AC with a dozen awards, and the 2121 Collegiate Advertising Awards came in with six more.

Amarillo College is once again in the running for the nation’s biennial signature recognition of community college excellence – the $1 million Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence.

The Aspen Institute on April 27 announced 25 semifinalists for the 2023 Aspen Prize, and Amarillo College, which in 2021 attained Top 5 recognition and was named an Aspen Rising Star, is in the running once more.

Amarillo College, with enthusiastic support from industry stakeholders, is now better positioned than ever to propel students to a wide variety of careers in the burgeoning banking and finance industry.

On April 26, the AC Board of Regents approved a new Banking and Finance Certificate and, pending approval of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the academic certificate will be offered at AC beginning next fall.

The leaders of Amarillo College and Lubbock Christian University signed an articulation agreement on Monday, April 25 that ensures seamless transfer of credit hours between the two schools.

The signing ceremony took place on the second floor of the College Union Building on AC’s Washington Street Campus.

Students at Amarillo College can learn about veterinary medicine and how to embark on a pathway to careers in the field during a panel discussion from 11:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 27 on the Washington Street Campus.

The event will be at The Underground - the basement in the Ware Student Commons - and panelists will include faculty and administrators from the Texas Tech School of Veterinary Medicine in Amarillo, and other experts in the field.

A series of ritualistic slayings ignited a firestorm of panic that engulfed Austin, Texas in 1885, yet this lurid chapter in the city's history was largely forgotten until a historic thriller titled The Midnight Assassin hit bookstores in 2016.

Amarillo College is pleased to announce that Skip Hollandsworth, whose long-researched tome about America's first known serial killer became a New York Times bestseller, will present the 2022 Creative Mind Lecture.

As many as 250 area high school students are expected to converge on Amarillo College's East Campus to showcase their work and compete for prizes over a two-day span at the Top of Texas Career & Technical Education Expo.

The event is Tuesday and Wednesday, April 26-27 and will be headquartered in the Public Service Building, although some contests will take place in the Transportation Center and the Manufacturing Education Center.

Gary McCoy says his photo exhibit, Urban Vacancies, "investigates the psychological reaction to constructed and transitional space crated through urban design, planning, development, and abandonment in Dallas."

Urban Vacancies is on display now through May 5 at Amarillo College's Southern Light Gallery. The venue is located on the first floor of the Ware Student Commons on the Washington Street Campus.

“This is where I turned my life around,” said Hammons, who is one of 1,130 summer and fall graduates eligible to participate in AC’s Fall Commencement ceremony on Friday, Dec. 17 at the Amarillo Civic Center. Masks, while not required, are recommended.

The ceremony begins at 7 p.m. in the Civic Center Coliseum and will be live-steamed and available for repeat viewings at https://livestream.com/panhandlepbs/acfa2021

“I find mathematics to be very therapeutic,” said the assistant professor of mathematics at Amarillo College. “It’s the framework for all of the sciences and for the beauty in art and in music. It’s the foundation for architecture. It’s a universal language that teaches us logic. “I love mathematics because it is reliable and logical and very beautiful,” she said. “I love sharing that with other people, communicating those concepts to all kinds of students.”

Life as a first-responder is an emotional rollercoaster, and Olsen, director of the Emergency Medical Services Professions (EMSP) program at Amarillo College, strives to prepare students for the peaks and valleys inherent to the profession.

“You may be in a bar ditch, upside down in a snow storm, trying to save a life . . . you have to be able to realize that bad things happen and you can’t fix it all, but at least you know you were there trying to help,” Olsen said. “That’s how I do it.

“My images are the result of overlapping sources of inspiration and research and always maintain connection to (my) childhood imagination,” said Davis, an assistant professor of photography at Southern Utah University.

High school juniors and seniors, along with Amarillo College students who aspire to transfer to a university, will have access to a smorgasbord of outstanding higher-education offerings at the 2021 Amarillo Area Night College Fair.

“Our culture of caring didn’t just pop up one day with a slogan,” says Newburg, a 20-year veteran of the Theatre Arts program he now oversees at AC. “This College has always been a place where everybody’s open and more than willing to help. I remember it from the very moment I came into the fold as a student.

Amarillo College, long renowned for its exceptional brand of multi-disciplinary tutoring, just raised the bar even higher.

The Hispanic-Serving Institutions STEM Grant positions the College to cultivate initiatives that enhance academic and apprenticeship models for students on STEM career pathways.

Fortunately, a grant the College received in September from the U.S. Department of Education will greatly lessen the childcare burden for some of AC’s most economically disadvantaged student-parents.The four-year grant is valued at a total of $678,992.Under terms of the grant, the College will receive $169,748 per year to provide students with childcare subsidy vouchers to cover costs at AC’s Hagy Childcare Center or AC’s Child Development Lab School. Participants must meet Federal Pell Grant and income-eligibility guidelines.

Ever since the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic, Mario Mireles, instructor of microbiology at Amarillo College, has sought to become part of the solution.

Amarillo College and Texas Woman’s University are poised to establish a partnership to create a seamless pathway to teacher certification that will effectively increase the number of homegrown teachers serving Texas Panhandle communities.