FAYETTEVILLE - When Raymond Walter was 11 years old, a school counselor evaluating whether he should skip sixth and seventh grades asked him why he would want to do that.
“Who am I going to talk to about nanotechnology in sixth grade?” Walter said, recalling his lighthearted response.
The counselor half-joked that he probably wouldn’t find that in eighth grade either, before concluding that the boy should advance.
Walter eventually skipped 11th grade, too, graduating from Mountain Home High School at 14 with a gradepoint average topping 4.0 and enrolling at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville by 15.
This morning, Walter will graduate from UA at 18 with a bachelor of science in physics, math and economics. His accelerated learning schedule has him finishing his master’s degree over the summer and beginning workon his doctorate this fall.
If it seems Walter is pushing himself as if there isn’t much time, that’s because there isn’t, he said.
Walter has known since childhood he has Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic disorder with a life expectancy into the late 20s.
It is the most common fatal genetic disorder diagnosed in childhood, according to the nonprofit Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy.
Walter said he has beenblessed with parents who committed to do whatever it takes to make sure he is happy and intellectually challenged.
“It wasn’t a blind faith,” said Hal Walter, 51, who has lived with his son in his dormitory during the week and accompanied him around campus, commuting three hours to their Baxter County farm on the weekends.
“Ray is extremely competitive - and so physically, that wasn’t going to fly,” said his mother, Gail Walter, on Friday morning as she met Hal Walter to attend their son’s induction into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society at noon in Old Main’s Giffels Auditorium. “He’s competing at an intellectual level.”MAJOR PLANS
UA professors, advisers and administrators helped Raymond Walter tailor a triple major in physics, math and economics from the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences on a campus where a double major for a single undergraduate degree is the most a student can usually handle.
One of his UA professors, Javier Reyes, taught Walter in a graduate-level macroeconomics class in spring 2011.
“Raymond impressed me from the first moment we met,” said Reyes, who was then on the faculty of UA’s Walton College of Business but is now the campus’s vice provost for distance education.
“After sitting down to talkto him and his dad, it was clear that he had a plan, he had a goal, and they would not stopuntil he had achieved that goal,” Reyes said in an e-mail Friday.
“Even more impressive was his ability to absorb new material, understand it,master it and be able to participate in conversations with Ph.D. students,” he said. “He held his ground and was very successful in that course.”
Reyes said Walter had a “strong bias” for Austrian economics, an economic school of thought based on free-market theory, but was able to master and discuss economic topics in more traditional areas as well.
Walter’s favorite experience was presenting a paper he wrote on mathematics during a spring 2012 sectional meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Lawrence, Kan.
“I have to say, it wasn’t anything original,” he said of his paper. But he was proud and honored to have been chosen to speak to the group.
Walter learned Thursday that a paper to which he contributed along with other UA scientists was published in the online version of the journal Physical Review B, which focuses on materials physics and condensed-matter phenomena.
MOVING QUICKLY
The type of muscular dystrophy Walter has graduallyrobs patients of their skeletal muscle strength.
The progressive muscle weakness eventually leads to loss of mobility, and serious heart and lung problems, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Walter said that while he lost his ability to walk gradually, by 12 he was using a wheelchair full time.
Besides hard work, his secrets for accelerating his education included taking Advanced Placement courses, online high school-level courses from the University of Missouri-Columbia’s distance-education program and college-level UA Global Campus correspondence courses, and testing out of some courses.
Hal and Gail planned early on to ensure their son could achieve his dreams and grow up along with his two siblings in a family-oriented community.
In 2005, the couple relocated their family of five from Tabernacle, N.J., to a farm in Baxter County just north of Mountain Home.
Gail Walter said the roughly 200-acre farm was a bit bigger than what they wanted, but it was perfect in terms of accessibility for Raymond. It was like a sign, she said, and they surprised friends and family back home when they returned from house-hunting saying, “We bought it.”
A certified registered nurse-anesthetist who works a 45-hour week at that job, Gail Walter has not only stoked the home fires while her son and husband were at UA , she’s managed to run the farm pretty much by herself during that time, too, which involves raising cattle, pigs, horses and donkeys. Raymond’s sister Emily, 20, attends University of Central Arkansas in Conway, and his brother, Ron, 23, graduated from UCA.
MANAGING IT ALL
Raymond’s scholarships and fellowships have helped the family manage. He studied on a Chancellor’s Merit Scholarship and Governor’s Distinguished Scholarship. He was also a National Merit Scholar.
When he begins seeking his separate doctoral degrees in math and physics this fall, he will do so under the UA Graduate School’s Distinguished Doctoral Fellow award program, which provides a minimum of $30,000 annually for up to four years. Walter also won a $30,000 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for the forthcoming academic year.
When Raymond is in class, Hal Walter waits for him on campus reading a book or chatting with professors and groundskeepers who have become acquainted with the pair.
“I can tell you that his family is an inspiration to us all,” Reyes said. “A dad that goes to college with his son because his son has enormous potential, but has some limitations for movement. A mom and a sister who stayed at home and managed the farm.”
“I wish many of our students could see what this kid and his family have accomplished. This is a kid with great potential who perhaps is only running against time -
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 05/11/2013