Best & Brightest: Injury Leads Student to New Career Goal, New Charity, New Outlook on Life

During his freshman year at Pennsylvania State University in 2000, Adam Taliaferro had dreams of entering the NFL. But during the season’s fifth game against Ohio State, Taliaferro’s life took a dramatic turn.

He went to make a tackle he’d made plenty of times before, but this one resulted in a broken bone in his neck. “I didn’t think I was paralyzed … you just think that couldn’t happen to you,” he says

Taliaferro, a third-year law student at Rutgers University, says his injury and story of recovery has been anything but a setback. With a new-found appreciation for life, Taliaferro is on a career path he never before considered and he serves as a source of encouragement for others.

The incident shattered his vertebrate, causing spinal cord injury and paralyzing Taliaferro from the neck down. Physicians told Taliaferro’s parents that they should start preparing their son for life in a wheelchair and that he would have a 3 percent chance of walking again.

But over the course of 7 months, the now 25-year-old Sicklerville, N.J., resident underwent a dramatic recovery that defied the odds and went beyond medical expectations. He was in intensive care for two weeks and rehabilitation for several months, an experience he describes as “kind of like I was a baby all over again … I was learning how to brush my teeth and learning how to take care of myself.”

Today, he says, “just being able to walk to class. Being able to write on my own and just little things people don’t think about, I’ve learned to appreciate a lot more.”