Gray Brooks is a thinker’s thinker. In fact, his belief in critical thinking is as strong as his belief in a more efficient government. Today he works as a Senior API Strategist at GSA in Washington, D.C. His job title, deciphered in layperson’s terms, means he works with other federal agencies in the government on the pragmatic use of open source and ATIs. “Both have substantial opportunity to improve the way government works, to make the government more reliable and useful and less expensive,” Gray says.

Before he was a Strategist, he was New Media Ombudsman for Obama for America; and before that he was a freshman at PC, majoring in political science and taking two semesters off to work
on the Howard Dean campaign. “My interest in politics existed
before I went to college but in a very youthful way,” he says. “PC provided the flexibility and support to have my education be more
than what I learned in the classroom. I took a year off to work a presidential campaign, and PC was very supportive. They welcomed and encouraged me to do what I thought I needed to do, and I could still return and compliment what I learned out in the world with what I learned in the classroom.’

What Gray appreciated most was that PC could support him and
who he needed to become, even if that path wasn’t traditional. “The College has the flexibility—the willingness—to see what an individual needs at any point in time,” he says. “Sometimes that becomes dinner at a professor’s house.”

Theological discussions on Monday nights led by Dr. Peter Hobbie were exceptionally important to Gray’s intellectual growth. “The chaplain would open up a room and provide a space for 10 to 35 people each week to come to think and discuss in ways that were very conducive to our becoming who we needed to be,” he says. “Imagine a sermon but instead it’s a one-word prompt that turns into a conversation. Dr. Hobbie was a very informed pastor and professor, and even better at facilitating people starting to speak for themselves.”

Gray still lives and breathes that continued quest for knowledge. Each year, for the past nine years, he and a small group of alumni have gotten together to continue those philosophical and theological discussions that first began at the College. They call it the “Ruach“ retreat. Ruach is a Hebrew term meaning the word or the wind. “It gets to inspiration,” Gray says. “It’s something, an idea, that many of us believed in and wanted to live.”