Lately, most stories that start in Florida and include Black folks don’t conclude happily. This story is a welcome exception. Eighteen-year-old Jonathan Walker, a high school senior from Panama City, Fla., has reportedly received as much as $4 million in scholarship offers after having applied to 27 universities and been accepted by every single one. That list included Harvard, MIT, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University, to name a few. Walker has yet to make a decision on where he’ll matriculate, according to the Panama City News Herald. That might be because he’s still focused on being as close to a perfect high school student as may have ever existed. He studies in the International Baccalaureate program, which allows him to take college courses while still a student at Rutherford High School. He plays kicker on the school’s varsity football team, back in November banging this game-winner through the uprights—which is apparently not the only time that’s happened.
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Last October, he was Rutherford’s homecoming king, an honor apparently so pedestrian he didn’t even tweet about it. CBS Miami reports that he invented a device that’s worn on the wrist to help deaf and blind people communicate and is working on having it patented.
But he does have an idea of what major he wants to pursue, according to ABC’s Good Morning America.
“I’m mostly interested in engineering as well entrepreneurship, hopefully going down like a nonprofit route, creating devices to help people. But I’m also exploring the possibility of creating my own major since I have a ton of different interests,” Walker said.
Walker’s interest in engineering was initially sparked by a chemistry set gift from his parents, he says.
“My parents brought me a chemistry set a couple of years ago… I found a way to channel that curiosity into science and that soon blossomed into engineering. And then from there I really learned that I could use engineering to help people,” Walker said. “And so I just became super interested in creating devices that could help disadvantaged communities and people going though difficult problems.”
Why not? It seems that at only age 18, there’s pretty much nothing Walker can’t do.
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