Garret Freeman
A decade after first attending ECU, Garret Freeman finds his path
Garret Freeman admits that he couldn’t quite figure it out.
“The first time I came to ECU, it was in 2012 when I graduated high school,” he said. “I came here as a freshman, and I was coming to be an IT (information technology) major, but within a year of doing that, I quickly realized I did not have a passion for IT.”
A decade later, he found his passion — this time for engineering — and is back at East Carolina University to finish what he started.
Freeman is among 44% of students in the College of Engineering and Technology who are considered nontraditional, those adult learners who may have served in the military, attended a community college or spent time in the workforce before deciding to pursue a four-year degree.
After leaving ECU, Freeman returned to his home of Rocky Mount, worked at Krispy Kreme among other things and then eventually became a DJ at a local radio station. The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in lost pay and an evaluation of his future.
“I couldn’t financially support myself,” Freeman said. “When COVID happened, it was a bit of a shell shock to me, but it also opened up an opportunity to go back to school.”
He initially enrolled at Pitt Community College, where he excelled in class. An instructor suggested he explore engineering as a career.
Garret Freeman, standing, works with fellow students in the electrical circuitry lab in the Science and Technology Building. (Photo by Ken Buday)
“My dad was a network engineer, and my uncle was an electrical engineer who graduated from (North Carolina) A&T, so I talked with them. They gave me a little bit of an explanation, and I was like, ‘Oh well, we’ll give it a shot,’” he said.
Freeman applied for and received the PIRATES engineering scholarship while at Pitt Community College, allowing him to transfer to ECU. He’ll graduate in the fall of 2025.
With an electrical engineering concentration, Freeman is leaning toward a job as a manufacturing engineer. He recently completed a co-op with B/S/H Home Appliances in New Bern.
“I think it’s a pretty important role,” he said. “Manufacturing engineers are the people who are pretty much responsible for new products, process improvement, implementing new solutions and finding better ways to do things in factories — just an overall increase in efficiency production and the processes of a factory.”
Freeman said he has enjoyed his experience as an engineering major at ECU. He said the small class sizes have allowed him to develop relationships with engineering faculty and his classmates.
“Coming to ECU, you get more personal relationships. You get to meet a lot more people, and that’s the thing I like about the department as a whole,” Freeman said. “Not just the faculty, but you see so many of the same students over and over that once you take a class, you know 30 students when you leave that class, so when you take another class with them, it’s like, ‘Hey, I remember you from this class,’ and you start to build that community. Now everywhere I go, I at least see somebody on campus that I know, so you start to build that familiarity with your professors, but likewise with your peers. … Relationships mean a lot to me, and I think it’s important for your personal growth.”
And sometimes those relationships are with students who can be a dozen years younger.
“That’s always the funny part,” Freeman said. “When they find out, they’re always like, ‘Dude, you’re so much older than us.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I was here in 2012, probably when you all were in middle school or something.’”
He said his only advice to his younger peers is to give 100% effort. As president of the National Society of Black Engineers and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers student organizations, Freeman said involvement in what ECU has to offer outside of class is important — even for nontraditional students.
“It’s the extracurricular stuff that helps shape your career,” he said. “The school gives you that foundation, but it’s everything else that makes your house look nice. You get a good foundation, a good understanding through school, but you’ve got to have the extras to make your house stand out from everybody else in the neighborhood. If you want to stand out in a room full of like-minded people, it’s always nice to have those extracurricular or volunteer opportunities with clubs. Anything that you can participate in to separate yourself from the crowd is great.”