Class of 2008
It was early February, 2007 and Eckerd College junior Grace Gair had just finished a Winter Term course co-taught by visiting professor Elie Wiesel, the late Nobel laureate, human rights activist, writer, educator and Holocaust survivor. As the spring semester was unfolding, Grace received an email from Carolyn Johnston, Ph.D., professor of American studies and history at Eckerd and co-teacher of the course.
Johnston, who is now the Elie Wiesel Professor of Humane Letters at College, wanted to inform the Eckerd community that Wiesel would be returning briefly to campus and there would be a reception for him. For Grace, this would cap an already amazing week. A day before the email arrived she had been elected president of the Eckerd College Organization of Students (ECOS).
Looking back, Grace suspects Johnston told Wiesel about the election results.
“Unbeknownst to me,” Grace explains, “he’d heard that I had won. And when I entered the room with all these people, before I could even begin to address him, he greeted me as “madam president.”
“That someone who touched the world so profoundly and was bigger than life in so many ways would take the time to be interested in this one individual’s life … It just meant so much to me and always will.”
Wiesel would undoubtedly be proud of what became of madam president.
Grace grew up in Fort Myers and learned about Eckerd from her mother, who made the nearly two-hour drive to take classes at the College. A Ford Scholar and a member of the Eckerd College Ethics Bowl team, Grace graduated in 2008 with degrees in anthropology and international relations, with a minor in Spanish. She received a Fulbright Scholarship to teach English to high school students in Daejeon, South Korea for a year. For her efforts, she was named Most Outstanding Foreign High School Teacher by the Daejeon Ministry of Education.
After earning a master’s of Public Policy with a concentration in economics from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany, Grace embarked on a career in technology and cyber risk management. She currently serves as Director of Technology Risk Management at Capital One, based in New York City.
She also has served as a team leader for New York Cares, the largest volunteer organization in New York City. For several years, she ran a program that prepared students at a public high school in Brooklyn to take the SAT test.
And her connection to Eckerd College remains strong. As one of the first and longest serving members of Eckerd’s Career Mentor Program, she travels from New York once a year to personally meet with her mentee.
Grace and sons Anton and Julius in Cape Cod
“It was the connections I made at Eckerd that influenced my thinking then and year over year,” she says. Johnny Boykins is a case in point.
Grace and student mentee Tara Bautista ’27 during Reunion Weekend 2024 on Eckerd’s
campus
Grace recently traveled to Berlin to celebrate her 10-year wedding anniversary. “My classmate from Eckerd, Johnny Boykins ’08, flew to Berlin to celebrate with me,” she explains. “We’re the best of friends. Even though we ran against each other for ECOS president, Johnny was then and has remained part of my close circle. I’m always interested in his perspective and deeply admire his commitment to community service and civic engagement.
“Eckerd prepares people to think critically and engage the tough questions. Technology and cybersecurity risk was not an obvious career choice for me. I kind of fell into this line of work.
“But there is no shortage of tough questions and debates in this field, and I’ve never stopped building on what I learned at Eckerd.”
Grace and Johnny Boykins ’08 in 2013; they were in each other’s weddings
