Scholarship helps students persevere through disability
“If you wish to be something, do not strive to be the smartest, nor race to be the most popular, for these are only weak plants that rot and die. Be pleasant, be patient, be poor but content, for these are blessings in disguise and will live with you forever.”
—“A Bluebird’s Desiderata” from , a collection of poems by Rob Wyant
Many scholarships go to the most gifted students: the smartest, the most talented and, of course, the fastest and strongest.
Rob and Rick Wyant circa 1976. Photo courtesy of Rick Wyant.
The University of Colorado Boulder’s is granted to students who might be none of the above, but somehow achieve academic success while overcoming the challenges of disability. Funded by 1976 CU Boulder Business School graduate Rick Wyant, the College of Arts and Sciences scholarship memorializes his late brother’s determination to overcome his own tragic obstacles.
“We both had to overcome hearing disabilities, but my brother got a scholarship and came to CU,” Wyant said of his brother, Robert, who majored in psychology. In 1978, Robert Wyant was in his senior year at CU when a severe windstorm changed his life forever.
“He was walking to his car, near 12th and College, when the storm blew a camper shell off a pickup,” Rick Wyant said.
Rob Wyant while attending University of Illinois graduate school in 1981. Photo courtesy of Rick Wyant
“The shell hit him square in the back. Had he not been hearing impaired, I believe he would have heard it. Had it struck him two inches to the left, it probably would have killed him. Two inches to the right, maybe it would have been different.”
As it was, the incident left Robert Wyant a quadriplegic for life and a fighter for the rest of his days, his brother recalls. After a year of rehabilitation, his brother returned to graduate in 1979 and turned to writing poetry as his window to the world.
“It made us both much more determined and much more spiritual, as well,” Rick Wyant said. While never a great source of income, Rick Wyant said his brother worked painstakingly at his poetry — pecking out the letters one key at a time and keeping that window open.
“He never made much money, but he would always have several pages in books (of poetry from multiple contributors) every year,” Rick Wyant said. “He finally was able to publish his own,” , in 1983.
In the meantime, Rick Wyant had also returned to Colorado after trying his hand at graduate school, but this time to work on computers. He went on to a successful career managing data systems at the Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site, before starting his own business, WDS Inc., along with a compatriot from Rocky Flats.
Robert Wyant would succumb to cancer in 2003. Rick Wyant and his wife, Marci, decided to start the scholarship in his brother’s honor in 2014.
So far, one student has been given multiple awards of the scholarship; her obstacles are almost as severe as Robert’s, his brother said.
“The point of the scholarship is to reward students who persevere through these challenges. Meeting her and seeing her successes was wonderful. We want to award people whose determination is strong to make their lives be everything they can.”