News

MOREHEADS LOOK BACK: After UNC, Wells hits the trail

Andrew Wells.

By Bill Moss, Published: July 11, 2016

It’s not often that Henderson County sends a Morehead scholar to UNC at Chapel Hill. It’s rarer still for the county to send two. Four years ago, Catherine Louise Swift, of West Henderson High School, and Andrew H. Wells Jr., of Hendersonville High School, each won the prestigious four-year scholarship, now called the Morehead-Cain. The award is a full scholarship covering all costs including housing and meals plus a summer enrichment program. Both Swift, the daughter of Rebekah Ellsworth, and Wells, the son of Dr. Andrew Wells and Katherine Wells, were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. The Lightning caught up with Swift and Wells after graduation to find out about their college experience and what they plan to do next.

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Andrew Wells, mock trial star, math whiz and varsity football player, would not ordinarily reside in the same sentence with the word lazy.
But Wells does it himself.
“Freshman fall,” he says, “is probably the best I will ever be at ping pong and the laziest I ever was as a student. I was taking 13 hours, four classes and L-fit (lifetime fitness).”
He’s talking about what became a four-year blood rivalry with one of his best friends.
“We played like an hour or two almost every weekday,” he says. His ping-pong rival, the son of medical doctors from Turkey who were pediatric specialists at UNC Hospitals, was from Chapel Hill.
“That family sort of became our surrogate home base,” Wells says. “Every Sunday night for the last two years of college we would all go over there and watch ‘Game of Thrones’ together. He had read all the books and I had read all the books, and he had a giant TV with HBO.”
Wells’ workload picked up when he chose economics as a major. He decided on the major because he enjoyed Econ 101.
“And secondly I wanted to do it because it was only eight classes,” giving him flexibility to explore other subjects. “That actually turned out to be a much more important reason because after taking Econ 101 my enjoyment of the economics department deteriorated significantly.”

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After his freshman year, Wells flew to London, where he and moved into Winston House, a UNC Honors College-owned home in the middle of London.
“All the classes were centered around the experience of living in London,” he says. “That was the best part. I took a literature class that was called the Literature of London. The only books we read were based in London, so you could walk around the settings of the all the books.”
He worked as an assistant to a liberal Democrat member of Parliament from Cornwall.
“It convinced me that I had no interest in going into politics,” Wells says. After his sophomore year, Wells plunged into a job that was “the most formative experience of my college career in terms of what I’m interested in doing.”
He worked for the criminal law internship program in Washington, D.C., a program where public defenders sent students out to “gather as much evidence as you can about these crimes that had just occurred.” Working as investigators for a public defender representing juveniles, Wells and his partner, a rising senior at Penn State, drove around poor neighborhoods tracking down defendants and witnesses and investigating cases.
“I went from having to wear a suit and tie and walking into the House of Parliament to going into D.C. and being told how best to interact with people in Anacostia,” he says.

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Back at school, Wells had joined the student attorney general’s staff. He worked his way up from managing associate to deputy attorney general on the honor court. His honor court work, counseling students on their cases and later working on the prosecution side, “was the thing that was the most constant outside of school,” he says.
The summer after his junior year, he worked for Frontline Solutions, a nonprofit in Durham that works with teenagers in the African-American community.
“Literally my first day of work was the shooting in Charleston,” he says.

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His single best experience at Carolina came at the end, in dramatic fashion.
On his very first day at Carolina, Wells met the seven guys who would become his best friends. By junior year, they all rented a house together off Cameron Avenue. Senior year, about February, as the Tar Heels were starting to gel into a contender, the housemates rolled the dice and bought plane tickets for the Final Four in Houston.
“However it happened, it actually worked out,” he says. “We got to go. We ended up being in the front row of the student section. We were all together.”
With 4.7 seconds left in the game, Marcus Paige hits the miracle shot to tie the score. Pandemonium. It looks like overtime for sure and every Carolina fan on the planet has no doubt the Tar Heels will win in the extra period. There’s a TV timeout. Every seat came with an orange seat cushion. In the delirium someone flings a cushion high into the air.
“The entire stadium just took their seat cushions and started throwing them,” Wells says “Orange disks are flying everywhere. People are hugging each other, people are crying. It was the most jubilant sports experience I’ve ever had, made that much more poignant that it didn’t last. Never going to forget that.” (Three seconds later, Villanova’s Kris Dunn ruined the moment for Carolina fans.)

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Wells’ post-graduation plan had its seed in his first Morehead summer experience, in the National Outdoor Leadership School in northern Wyoming.
“It was a perspective-expanding experience,” he says, “understanding that I can do this, understanding that there are lots of things I really didn’t think I could do or would enjoy doing.”
Three years later, the seed sprouted in “a casual conversation” with a housemate, a close friend from New Hampshire named Ian Gallager.
“I say, ‘Ian, got a crazy idea for you. Wanna hike the Appalachian Trail after we graduate?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, yeah I do.’ Now it’s coming in much sharper focus.”
(Wells and Gallager left on June 20 from Maine. Hiking southbound, they plan to finish by Thanksgiving.)
Wells took the Law School Admission Test in early June, and he plans to enroll in law school in the fall of 2017.

Wells’s father, Andrew, is a radiologist, and his mother, Kathryn, is a lawyer. When he’s asked how he tilted toward the law over medicine, the son chuckles.
“The first inclination that I wanted to go to law school was I believe when I was 11,” he says. “Me and my sisters had just finished a particularly enthusiastic argument, and my mom sat us all down and she says, ‘I have faith in all of you. You can do whatever you want but just please don’t go to law school.’ And my 11-year-old mind says, ‘Yep. Guess that’s what I’m doing.’”
He cites his mock trial experience under Jerry Smith at Hendersonville High School, too, and his work on the UNC honor court and his Morehead summer experiences. Those things “created a path that looks far more structured than when I was on it,” he says.