After a full and varied life spent as a nurse, actor, and father, it took a game of online backgammon in his 70s for Pesach Walter to realize he wasn't done contributing to the world. While playing online one day, he had a sudden, quiet realization:
“Backgammon is a fine game, but it wasn’t the work of my remaining years,” he explained.
After this epiphany came a practical question: What would let him contribute at the level he wanted? He concluded it was a doctorate.
“That’s the credential that’d allow me to speak to educators, coach doctoral students, and be taken seriously in the rooms I wanted to enter,” he shared.
Walter traded his virtual backgammon board for textbooks at University of Massachusetts Global, eventually completing his Ed.D. in Organizational Leadership at age 82.
“UMass Global’s program made it possible. It was rigorous enough that the degree would mean something, and flexible enough that I could complete it from Lanesborough, Massachusetts, at the pace an 80-year-old life allows.”
Dr. Marilou Ryder, professor of education and program chair for the Ed.D. program, shared that what made Walter so memorable was not simply his age but his openness to learning.
“He came to every conversation ready to listen, reflect, accept feedback, and make his work better,” she reflected. “He never approached the program as someone who already had all the answers because of his years of experience. Instead, he brought a lifetime of experience and combined it with genuine curiosity and a willingness to be coached. That is a powerful combination.”
Dr. Walter is now the author of “Finishing Strong: Earning a Doctorate at 82 and Helping Others Go Back to School After 60” and the founder of Graduate Ed Connect, a coaching practice for older adults returning to graduate study.
In this conversation, he shared with us how he’s embraced AI tools in his educational journey, the power of staying coachable at any age, and why defending his doctorate was not a finish line, but a starting gun.
You've been an enthusiastic adopter of AI in your scholarly and professional work. How did that begin, and what has it meant for the way you research and teach?
It began the day ChatGPT was released. I was 80 at the time, and I’d been around long enough to know when a technology was going to change everything. I’d felt the same way about the TRS-80 personal computer in the late 1970s. I started using ChatGPT immediately, and then UMass Global offered a free 30-hour course on AI for educators, offered through the Center of Instructional Innovation for faculty and students. I signed up. That course was the turning point. It was where I moved from experimenting to building a real practice.
The impact on my scholarship was immediate. In one afternoon, AI helped me identify 78 APA formatting issues in a draft that had already been through my own review. On the qualitative side, AI accelerated the coding phase of my dissertation research in ways that would have taken months by hand.
But the more meaningful shift was pedagogical. I began sharing prompts with Dr. Marilou Ryder, who passed them along to the doctoral cohort. That small act of amplification is what turned my personal practice into something the program benefited from. I now train teachers, from elementary through graduate school, in AI through a free curriculum on LinkedIn. Several hundred educators have participated so far.
Tell us about your work with Dr. Marilou Ryder. What did her role as your dissertation chair make possible for you?
Dr. Ryder is not only a distinguished dissertation chair, she’s also head of the program, which meant her guidance carried both scholarly and institutional weight. What she made possible for me, more than anything else, was structural clarity when I needed it most.
The single most important tool she gave me was an alignment table; a framework I used to keep my research question, my conceptual framework, my interview protocol, and my findings speaking to each other throughout the dissertation. It sounds mundane. It was transformative. Every time I felt myself drifting, that table brought me back. It’s also the tool that allowed me, at revision time, to identify discarded passages that were beautifully written but no longer aligned to the study and cut them without pain.
Beyond her scholarship, Dr. Ryder was the person who amplified my AI prompt sharing to the broader cohort and who first pointed me toward the free UMass Global AI course that changed my practice. She’s the kind of chair who invests in a student's whole trajectory, not only their dissertation.
You've mentored other doctoral students. What have you learned about persistence at the doctoral level?
Two things, both learned the hard way.
The first is that persistence is process over goal. Early in the program, when the workload was overwhelming, I noticed I was talking to myself the wrong way. My internal voice was saying, "Hang on; you're going to survive this."
That’s not the voice of someone who is going to finish. So I changed it. My new voice said, “Here we go, you're going to love this." Same reality, different framing. The doctoral process is long enough that the framing you carry through it determines whether you arrive intact.
The second is willingness to be coached. At 82, it would have been easy to insist I already knew how to do things. Instead, I let myself be coached by anyone with something to teach me: The AI course, a Zotero tutorial for bibliography management, an editor who improved my writing, and, perhaps most usefully, my own adult children. One of my sons is a university dean and another manages an emergency department. Both are experts in their fields, and both were generous with their expertise.
A doctoral candidate who’s unwilling to be coached is a doctoral candidate who doesn’t finish.
You recently successfully defended your dissertation with Dr. Ryder as your chair. Walk us through that day. What did it feel like when it was over?
I spent the morning of the defense in my home office in Lanesborough, with coffee and toast, reviewing my slides one more time. I was surprised to find myself feeling anxious; more so than I’d expected. I was also carrying a private grief that morning. I had lost my cat Abby the week before, and she’d been my quiet companion at every lecture, every immersion, and every long writing session over the years of the program. She’s mentioned throughout my book, and I named her in my acknowledgments during the defense.
The anxiety was slight, though, because the confidence underneath it was real. I knew the material. Dr. Ryder had told me the presentation was strong. I’d attended a colleague's defense the week before and knew what to expect. I was well rehearsed. And I had a short list of comments I planned to stress; points I sensed instinctively would matter to my committee. I logged into the Zoom at just before 5:00 feeling anxious; the way a professional feels anxious before a performance they’ve prepared for. The anxiety was there, but it didn’t have the wheel.
What I remember most about the defense itself is the quality of my committee's engagement. Dr. Ryder as chair, along with Dr. Bendta Friesen and Dr. Tami Boatright, all took my work seriously. Their questions were probing, thoughtful, and specific to what I had written. They weren’t general or performative. At more than one point during the defense, I felt the particular satisfaction of a scholar being taken seriously by other scholars. That wasn’t something I’d felt often at 82, and I found myself grateful for it in real time. My daughter Ollie had joined the Zoom to witness, and there was a quiet pride in knowing she was there for it.
And here’s where my answer might surprise you. When it was over, when I heard the words that made me Dr. Walter, the feeling wasn’t the relief or exhaustion most people describe. What I felt was: now I can begin. I had been waiting for this day. Not to be done, but to be started. With the doctorate in hand, I can build my consulting practice at Graduate Ed Connect in earnest, get the book Finishing Strong into the hands of the older adults it was written for, and turn the AI training I've been sharing on LinkedIn into something wider. The defense wasn’t the finish line. It was the starting gun.
Why does completing this milestone at this stage of your life matter to you?
It matters because I’m now living proof of what I believe. That graduate study isn’t the province of the young, and that a good mind and a willing spirit are not bounded by age. For every person over 60 who was told, quietly or otherwise, that their moment has passed, I hope my doctorate is a small argument against that.
What would you tell someone in their 60s, 70s, or 80s who assumes it's too late to pursue a graduate degree, and why should they consider UMass Global?
I’d tell them first that the question they’re asking is the wrong one. Is it too late? isn’t the question. The question is: What do you want to do with the time you have? If the honest answer includes contributing something, learning something, or being fully engaged with the world again, then graduate school isn’t out of reach. It may be exactly the door you’re looking for.
I would also tell them something I’ve learned firsthand. At a certain age, the world quietly stops asking your opinion. That’s a real loss, and most people over 60 feel it without being able to name it. Graduate school makes the world ask again. It puts you back in a room where your ideas are expected, where classmates lean in, and where a professor calls on you specifically because your perspective matters. In the past year alone, I completed my doctorate, published a book, and launched a coaching practice for older adults returning to graduate education. That isn’t a résumé. That’s a life still in motion. Yours can be too.
As for UMass Global specifically: What made it work for me, more than the flexibility or the platform, was the culture of welcome. From my first immersion, I was treated as a scholar rather than as an oddity. My chair invested in me. My committee took my work seriously. When I discovered something useful, the program passed it on to other students. That kind of environment is not a given in graduate education, and it’s worth going out of your way to find.
If you’re sitting where I sat a few years ago, wondering whether it’s too late, whether you still have it in you, whether anyone is waiting for what you know; I promise you the answer is yes. Start with a conversation. UMass Global is a good place to have it.
Looking to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Walter? At UMass Global, our flexible, online programs are designed to support working professionals across the globe, at every step, and wherever our students are in life.
Interested in learning more about this program?
Visit our Ed.D. in Organizational Leadership page for more information.
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If you’re interested in learning more about Dr. Walters or returning back to school, register for his upcoming webinar Finishing Strong at 82 – A Conversation with Dr. Pesach Walter on Monday, November 16th at 4 pm PT.
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