September 7, 2010 (Jupiter, FL) – If you asked for the names of the brightest and most motivated students attending the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University, you would end up with a very long list.  Florida Atlantic University strives to be a leader in honors education, and the Wilkes Honors College attracts a rich pool of high achieving undergraduates from Florida and around the world. But one of the names that would surely appear on everyone’s list is Alan Gray, a senior with a double concentration in Law & Society and Spanish who is one of the recipient’s of the Henry Morrison Flagler Scholarship, Florida’s most competitive scholarship program.
            Alan hails from Eastside High School in Gainesville, Florida. He graduated from its International Baccalaureate program and came to the Honors College in the fall of 2007. Alan says that he chose to attend the Honors College because he believed it to be “an extension of the education I received in my high school’s International Baccalaureate program; that is, intense, well-rounded, and meaningful.”
            While at the Honors College, Alan has participated in many organizations including the FAU Jupiter House of Representatives, the Society of Future Attorneys, the Honors College Judiciary Board, Corn Maya, the FAU Student Code of Conduct Board, and Sigma Delta Pi, a National Collegiate Spanish Honor Society. The organization that has had the biggest affect on his life, however, has been the Debate Team.
            Alan founded the Debate Team in 2007 and has been the president and coach ever since. “Coaching the Debate Team has given me a wonderful opportunity to see how communication, rhetoric, and argumentation can have powerful effects on a speaker’s audience, and to watch individuals conquer their fear of public speaking.” He has won a number of awards in debate competitions, including the State Championship title in Parliamentary Debate, Lincoln-Douglas Debate, and Extemporaneous Speaking in 2009. He successfully retained his title in Lincoln-Douglas Debate in 2010.
            This past summer, Alan discovered a way to combine his love of the law, Spanish, and communication. In Barcelona, Spain, he interned for an attorney who specialized in tax and immigration law. When asked what the most challenging aspect of the internship was, he said that it was “interacting in a city which primarily spoke a different language. I overcame this challenge by learning basic words and phrases in Catalán, and by engaging speakers in Castilian whenever possible.” The best aspect for Alan was developing his own way of speaking the Spanish language. “After seven years of simply copying others’ manners of speaking, I finally developed my own manner of communicating in Spanish.”
            After graduation, Alan plans to attend law school and clerk for one or more federal judges. Then he intends to join a practice that specializes in appeals on constitutional grounds and hopes to one day be appointed to a federal appeals bench himself.
            Alan feels that his education at the Honors College has prepared him well for the future. “The Honors College has not only provided an excellent foundation for the legal education I will receive in law school, but has also taught me about a number of different subjects that will give me useful perspectives in that venue that my peers will lack.”
            Jeffrey L. Buller, Dean of the Wilkes Honors College, notes, “If you ever receive an email from Alan, it’s impossible not to notice his address: chiefjusticegray. I beginning to think that’s not just exuberance; it’s a prediction.  And we’re already extremely proud of all of Alan’s achievements.  There’s really no limit to how far he can go.”  We are certain that Alan Gray will make as significant an impact on the rest of the world as he has at the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University.

byline: WHC Student Intern Tamara Howard