USC Valedictorian Rises Over Tragedy

Sometime this morning, between the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” and the conferring of degrees, the 9,352 students graduating from USC will rise from their chairs to applaud one man who can’t rise from his.

Class valedictorian Kemal Demirciler is a quadriplegic who was paralyzed in a diving accident three weeks before his freshman year was to begin.

Subsequent surgeries and rehabilitation took seven years. But the Cyprus-born Demirciler never lost his determination to study at USC. And study he did when he finally enrolled four years ago.

With only partial use of his hands, he labored through engineering lab work and nightly class assignments that routinely took three times longer for him than other students.

“I had to keep my scholarship,” he said. “I could not pay for my education, so I definitely had to get good grades.”

He emerged from behind his books this week to find that he is the only undergraduate to earn straight-A grades. He also found that his unusual perseverance has earned him respect across the campus.

The perfect 4.0 grade point average “hardly begins to tell the story” of the 28-year-old electrical engineering major, according to USC President Steven B. Sample. “He truly captures the strength of the human spirit.”

Demirciler plans a lofty valedictory speech on the role of multicultural communication in world peace. It’s not his style to talk about himself.

Demirciler was a 17-year-old star athlete and a gifted violinist at the time of the accident.

He was swimming with friends in the Mediterranean Sea near his island home when he stood on a buddy’s shoulders and dived in.

Unfortunately, the water was only 3 feet deep. Demirciler’s head hit the bottom, and the impact nearly severed the spinal cord in his neck.

As the youth struggled to recover, USC kept his application open. So did administrators of the Cyprus American Scholarship Fund, which had intended to pay Demirciler’s tuition and expenses.

His rehabilitation went slowly, however. Three operations aimed at repairing the spinal cord damage were unsuccessful.

Demirciler undertook a long-term, eight-hour-per-day physical therapy regimen that gradually helped give him the limited use of his hands.

By the time he was ready to enroll at USC, “I’d passed the stage of anger and disappointment,” he recalled. “The seven years had taught me patience--how to sit in front of the table and force myself to study.”

Fears that at age 24 he was now too old to fit in with other college students--and too disabled to blend in--proved unfounded. He moved into a one-bedroom campus apartment and recruited classmates as lab partners to help him with hands-on classroom experiments.

“I was one step behind most of the time, watching. I knew that just watching wasn’t good enough,” he said. So he concentrated even harder on the book work.

Throughout his college years classmates say he never asked for any special favors, and they never heard him grumble about his paralysis.

“He’s a person who has never let the road bumps stop him,” said fellow engineering student Panduka Wijtunga, who has been a friend since the two met four years ago in their first university class, a freshman English composition course.

Said engineering professor John Choma: “I wish he was my son--he’s that kind of person.”

Demirciler plans to stay at USC to earn advanced degrees. His professional goal is to return to northern Cyprus and open a technical institute in honor of his father, Onay Demirciler, who died two years ago.

Meanwhile, Demirciler has a personal goal.

“My main thing is to get out of this wheelchair. Now I just have to wait for some kind of cure,” he said.

“I think I still have the faith this will be over sometime in the future. That’s the main thing that helps me. I just hope I’m not mistaken.”

* ANOTHER GRAD

Arthur Hemingway Jr. graduates today from USC, 18 years after he arrived. C1