Gavin Lewis of Bergen was among a distinguished group of students who were recognized for their academic excellence earlier this month.
The President's List is compiled in recognition of students achieving a high standard of academic excellence and is distributed by the Office of Academic Affairs. To qualify for this award, Lewis a Psychology major, had to earn at least a 4.0 GPA with at least 12 semester hours of graded credit.
President John Delaney acknowledged the level of difficulty students face in qualifying for this award. Delaney said the challenge of achieving an untattered GPA requires incredibly hard work.
In his ceremonial remarks, the Vice President of Academic Affairs, Art Vanden Houten, congratulated Lewis and the other recipients on what he considers a remarkably hard-earned accomplishment.
"It is an incredible individual accomplishment," Vanden Houten said. "As the president appropriately noted, many of you are carrying four or five classes. Many of you are working, and many of you have leadership positions on campus... And of course, I couldn't even begin to mention the individual stressors that you all face during the course of a semester"
Vanden Houten spoke on why this impressive academic achievement "captures so much" of what Flagler College is all about, underscoring the "communal nature of higher education" no matter how "solitary" the academic work to achieve this honor may seem.
"First, we're in conversation with the books that we're reading, the papers that we're writing, the math equations that we're studying," he said. "That alone is kind of a conversation with others. But for a student to really be successful, it takes the support of many, many, many other people."
He also pointed out the friends, family, peers, and professors who attended the ceremony in support that afternoon, taking a moment to acknowledge the dedication of Flagler's professors and the bar he encourages them to set in the classroom.
