Cameron Stevenson ‘24 grew up in a house on a road named for his great-great-grandfather.
His family home is in rural Chatham County, North Carolina, and is attached to a Siler City address, Bonlee phone number and Goldston fire department. His grandparents live down the road in the house his great-great-grandfather built.
“I’m definitely a homebody,” he said. “So with NC State being just an hour away from home, it was a no-brainer. And I heard it was a good school, and with the connections it has in the area — because I want to stay in the area — that was the only school I was going to go to.”
Stevenson, who graduates in December with a B.S. in construction engineering, made the most of his time living away from home. While at NC State, he traveled to San Francisco, Boston, New Orleans and Montreal thanks to funding from the Engineer Your Experience program. He took one of his roommates — a French student attending SKEMA Business School — on a requested tour of a Dollar Tree. And he met graduate students from all over the world while working in the Constructed Facilities Laboratory (CFL), where he used his construction skills and carpentry talent to help with commercial and research projects.
Stevenson started his higher education career at Central Carolina Community College (CCCC), where he took two classes while in high school to qualify for the Central Carolina Promise, which guaranteed two years tuition-free. He lived at home, attended classes and worked part-time during the school year and full-time in the summers building horse barns. That job helped him build up his hands-on construction skills.
“CCCC was really helpful at preparing students for the next step,” he said. “They knew a lot of kids were going to go to NC State due to close proximity, and it’s the public engineering school of the state.”
In 2022, Stevenson applied to transfer to NC State’s Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering (CCEE) and was a finalist for the Goodnight Scholarship. After the interview round, he learned he was not one of the 50 transfer students selected for the scholarship. He started looking for a job.
At his home church, a woman who earned a master’s degree in civil engineering at NC State told him about CFL, a 20,000-square-foot research lab for advanced research and development of construction materials. He contacted Greg Lucier, associate research professor and manager of CFL, met with him, and was hired.
“I’ve enjoyed working there and learned a lot,” Stevenson said. “Sometimes one door closes and another door opens.”
As a student worker for CFL, he assisted with commercial projects, including testing of precast work, composite panels and fiber-reinforced polymers. He also helped graduate students put together their test setups and figure out what tools they needed to use.
“Most people who have done research understand that the whole setup is the longest part for maybe 10 minutes of fun, of breaking things, and then after that, you do it all over again,” he said.
In the lab, concepts he learned in class were brought to life. Graduate students were quick to answer his questions, and they pointed him toward the organizations he was involved with as a student. By joining student chapters of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and American Concrete Institute and getting involved with other CCEE projects and groups, he was able to travel, make friends and apply concepts to real-life situations.
His advice to incoming and current students is to take it all in and learn as much as they can.
“It’s easier to learn the material than it is to try to just get the good grade, you know, because you don’t know when or where you might actually need that knowledge out in the field,” he said. “You don’t know what lies in the future. So being able to learn everything and having a variety of knowledge can help you have more options.”
Stevenson’s mom, dad, brother and some extended family are coming to Raleigh for his CCEE graduation ceremony. He will celebrate with a fishing trip in the Bahamas in January.
He has a job lined up in land development at an engineering firm in Holly Springs, and when his lease in Raleigh ends in June, he’ll move back home to Chatham County.
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