Cam Walters ’26 can still point to the moment everything clicked.

It was early – his first semester after transferring into Guilford College – sitting in a macroeconomics class taught by Sulon Bibb Stedman Professor of Economics Bob Williams, trying to get his bearings in a new place, a new major, a new direction entirely.

Cam went to high school in Greensboro. He attended a small college in Maryland to study biochemistry. Guilford College and economics wasn’t supposed to be the plan. But then he got sick and started questioning his major.

He came home and took a look at Guilford. “I just fell in love with it the first week I was here,” Cam says.

Not because that macroeconomics class was easy, but because it wasn’t.

“I just loved the thinking,” he says. “When I thought of economics, I thought it was more business-focused. I didn’t realize the critical thinking behind it … it’s very analytical in the way that it’s thought of and worked through.”

That shift – from what he thought economics was to what it actually demanded – changed everything. Cam, a self-described “math nerd,” found something that met him where he was and pushed him further.

“I tend to draw towards things that require a lot of critical thinking,” he says. “I like that itch in my head.”

And so he stayed with it. Leaned into it. Built something out of it.

On May 9 Cam and his itch will graduate from the College with a degree in Economics, an endpoint that feels, in his words, “bittersweet.”

“I’ve loved my time at Guilford, but I’m also really proud of what I was able to do and now it’s time to move on,” says Cam, the College’s Academic Excellence in Economics award winner.

That time was shaped, in large part, by proximity – to professors, to classmates, to the kind of relationships that don’t happen as easily in bigger lecture halls.

“It’s such a small department,” Cam says. “You’re able to build meaningful relationships with those professors … and with your peers.”

He names them easily – Economic professors like Bob and Natalya Shelkova – who taught him, challenged him, stayed with him beyond the classroom.

“Having the same professors that are super hands-on and care deeply about how their students do,” he says.

There’s a throughline in how Cam talks about Guilford: access. Not just to knowledge, but to people. To time. To space to figure things out.

“You’re learning how to actually work through a problem,” he says. “Not just kind of diving headfirst into it … but actually thinking about it, breaking it down step by step.”

That approach – deliberate, analytical, patient – is exactly what comes next.

Meet more members of Guilford's Class of 2026

After graduation, Cam will step into a full-time role as a staff accountant with an automation focus at The Fresh Market, a Greensboro-based grocer where he has already spent months as an intern.

The work fits. Not just because it’s in Cam’s field, but because it asks the same kinds of questions he learned to ask at Guilford.

Automation, in his case, means identifying repetitive tasks and finding smarter, faster ways to do them — often using coding tools like Python and Alteryx.

“Instead of taking three hours doing the same thing over and over again, it just does it right there for you in less than five minutes,” he says.

It’s efficiency, yes. But it’s also problem-solving. Systems thinking. Economics, in practice.

There’s more ahead, too. Cam isn’t done. He wants to go to grad school – maybe even get a Ph.D.

That ambition wasn’t always there. In fact, it wasn’t there at all before Guilford.

“I wouldn’t have thought of higher education unless I came here,” Cam says. “Guilford kind of helped me become one of those lifelong learners.”

He pauses on that idea – not as a tagline, but as something earned.

For a student who once thought he needed to leave home to find the right path, it turns out the answer was closer than expected. Not just geographically, but intellectually.

A class. A professor. A way of thinking.

“And once I got into it,” Cam says, “I couldn’t stop.”