The sun shone brightly on Little Giant Stadium at the Homecoming game against Denison University on Sept. 21, 2013. The wide-eyed fourth grader assisting as a ball boy plucked a game ball out of a puddle and, with a hand barely big enough to grasp the ball, tossed it to the official.
While he felt dwarfed by the players on the football team then, Noblesville, Indiana, native Aidan Walker ’25 graduates from Wabash in May having been one of those Giants on the sideline for the past four years.
“Wabash just came and found me,” Walker says. “My dad went to the same CrossFit gym as the Wabash defensive coordinator, and he gave me the chance to be a ball boy at a game. Then, senior year of high school in the middle of the season, I got a text from one of the coaches. We had an hour-and-a-half phone call. After that, it seemed like a no-brainer to me.”
The safety battled injuries multiple years—a broken arm as a sophomore and a torn ACL as a junior—but kept showing up and continuing to work and improve.
“The train keeps moving,” he says. “You get left at the train station—it’s a barrier you can’t control, but I’ve learned a lot from that, like knowing how to take care of my body and just be a better teammate.
“We had goals we wanted to accomplish, and I wanted to do that with my teammates. I loved owning my role on the team—making the people around me better. I was addicted to the process, having great moments with my teammates, seeing them succeed or make a good play, because I know how much work they put in in the offseason, in practice, every week in film. We can’t do that on our own. So when somebody makes a play, it’s like everybody makes a play.”
Professor of Chemistry Laura Wysocki, Walker’s academic advisor, saw the selflessness in the biochemistry major and biology minor.
“He was never about being a star player. He was always talking about how the team performed, how the defense as a whole performed,” she says. “The motivation for him wasn’t to play in the most games, to get the most tackles, to be the very best at that particular position, although he pushed himself really hard. It was more to help the team reach their goals, to be with everybody. He’s somebody who really appreciates that community and is willing to do the work to get there, whether he gets recognition or not.
“He had to have a surgery on his dominant arm while he was in my organic chemistry class,” Wysocki continues. “I remember thinking about making accommodations so he could write for exams and be in the lab. I asked him what he thought he would need, and he said, ‘I’m just going to recover a little faster than what the typical time is.’ Sure enough, he almost didn’t skip a beat. He was really resilient and backed up the ‘I’m not going to let this stop me’ attitude. He basically said, ‘I’m going to study while I’m in recovery, make up that time, and just hit the ground running when I get back.’ That encapsulates how Aidan approaches things. He’s not afraid of a challenge, and he’s enthusiastic about finding ways to push through.”
Originally a history buff, Walker, with the help of his mom, found a volunteer opportunity as a boy at Conner Prairie. He worked as a volunteer and later as an employee from elementary school through high school.
“I naturally gravitated toward the animal barn and animal encounters experience, but I also volunteered with the agriculture department and interpreted the animals to guests,” he says. “Sometimes the inner-city school groups would come, and a lot of them had never seen a calf before. I would tell them fun facts, stuff we did at Conner Prairie, why our breeds of livestock were unique compared to others.”
In addition to his work with animals at Conner Prairie, Walker assisted a nearby dairy farmer; showed, bred, and sold rabbits for 4-H; and completed numerous 4-H projects on cattle.
“I love cows,” he says. “It was fun to halter train calves, just interacting with domesticated animals, learning their personality, because they’re a lot different than dogs or cats, but sometimes they can be like a dog too. I did a bunch of 4-H projects on cows, on artificial insemination and embryo transfer, and from feed to milk, diving into the intricacies of how a cow turns grass into milk, and how there are two different industries with cows—dairy and beef.”
Walker’s activities as an adolescent pointed him toward an obvious career path.
“I want to be a large-animal veterinarian,” he says. “I believe animals are here for a purpose and for the betterment of humans. I’m fascinated with how animals can make people feel and the purpose they serve, and I want to take care of them.”
Jill Rogers, health advisor and program coordinator for the Global Health Initiative, says Walker displays the initiative Wabash desires from all its students.
“I was impressed early on with how devoted he is to animals,” Rogers says. “I know that’s what we hope for in our future vets, but Aidan has taken this to a new level; he’s worked with all kinds of animals—farm animals, pets, even animals at exhibits—since he was in middle school. Aidan examines animal health through many different lenses and has done this while being a varsity athlete and excellent student.”
Walker credits his success to the pre-health program, resources available on campus, and through alumni, saying, “I’ve been able to talk to a few alumni who are veterinarians and also get internship experience.”
One of his internships was at Corvus Biomedical (north of campus in Montgomery County).
“It’s cardiovascular research for things like diabetes and obesity using a unique swine model that mimics the human prediabetic genotype,” Walker says. “I’m a laboratory technician, so I’m running a lot of experiments for universities like Northwestern, Louisville, and Stanford, and a few companies.
“I didn’t have a lot of experience with pigs before. I liked learning pig behavior and learning how they communicate. Sometimes they’ll bark at you. It sounds scary, but they’re not. They’re just talking to you.”
Wysocki knows Walker will be in his element when he begins working toward his doctor of veterinary medicine at Purdue University in the fall.
“He gets a twinkle in his eyes whenever he talks about something he’s really passionate about—animals and outdoors,” says Wysocki. “Once you get him going on those topics, he explodes with enthusiasm. You can tell that he really loves what he does and what he’s going to do as a veterinarian in the future.”
What advice does Walker have for the 10-year-old self who was tossing footballs on the Wabash sideline more than a decade ago, oblivious to the path set in motion that day?
“Just get ready,” he says. “There’s going to be a lot that happens. It’s going to be really cool.” .