Cameron King

Jack Long
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 02:06:25 +0000
Hilton-SP2020

Cameron King, a first-year in electrical and computer engineering, knew he wanted to be an engineer after countless robotics competitions in high school. After his family was struck by a sudden setback when he was in eighth grade, his parents set an example of resilience that he’s taken with him to college.

“Around the middle of my eighth-grade year, we actually had a pretty catastrophic event with our house.”

“Our house was at the base of a hill, and I guess there was some kind of erosion that happened through the winter, and it broke our foundation. My dad was actually home one day and he heard a loud pop. We walked into the back, where there’s, like, a laundry room and it was a concrete floor. There was no carpet or anything. There was just, like, a crack, a pretty big crack that was going on. The windows, where they were, like, squares, started shifting into parallelograms because it was so bad.”

“We tried to file an insurance claim, but for some reason, the insurance would not cover such a random event. They said, ‘We can’t cover a cause like that.’”

“My parents couldn’t do anything. They probably did have a pretty decent position if we were to have a case or something like that, but the problem is: Whenever you have no house, who has the time to get a lawyer?”

“About two years before that event happened, my mom had started as a part-time student because she wanted to go back to nursing school. A year into that, she committed to being a full-time student. My dad picked up so many more shifts and anything that he could, and my mom was going really hard as a full-time student.”

“We didn’t have the property of the house and the property of the land with my dad’s motorcycle shop. Since we’d lost all that land, we had to file bankruptcy because we had no possible way to pay off the rest of the house.”

“These things are pretty catastrophic, but my parents are really strong. I was in the transition of being a teenager at the time, and they were really protective of that sensitive time. They didn’t make me work or anything like that because they knew my academics were doing so well. They didn’t want to spoil that for anything, even if it meant them having to work harder.”

“My mom was still going as a full-time student, but she was also working full time. It was difficult for my dad because he had worked all of his life as a local business owner. He ended up getting another job where he was getting paid very little. It was pretty low to support a family who had just lost their house.”

“We got lucky. I had this friend from middle school that I was super close with, and I’m still super close with. He introduced me to his church, and they actually had property for people who are transitioning. It was like a house right beside the church. It was amazing. I want to say the event happened around, like, January, February, and then we were able to stay there until about June.”

“We weren’t homeless for that long — you know, like a week — and we were just staying with family. It’s still that fear: Where is the next home going to be? We got lucky enough with that property and having close connection with friends, but other than that, it would be hard to tell where that transition would have happened.”

“Now after working nonstop for the past four years, my mom and other family members are finally learning to enjoy life again.”

“We live in a super nice house now that’s amazing. It definitely was a product of my parents working really hard.”

“Essentially what I see my parents doing is they’re taking the tiniest sliver of opportunity they have available and they’re trying to see how far they can take that to make the lives better for those around them.”

“I’m trying to do the same with college. After being lucky enough to be the recipient of a large scholarship, I want to make the most out of this one opportunity, just like they have.”

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