Editor’s Note: In 2022, Campbell Magazine interviewed 12 freshmen (picked randomly) during summer orientation to discuss their goals and expectations for their next four years. The first to be featured among the group that remained at Campbell all four years is 2026 engineering graduate Dantzler Bonner. The upcoming Summer 2026 edition of Campbell Magazine will include a longer story of Bonner and more photos from her four years at Campbell.
Dantzler Bonner says she’s changed a lot since freshman orientation nearly four years ago, and she’s talking about more than just her hair. Watching a video of her pre-college self answering questions about her hopes and dreams, Bonner sees a different person.
“She was nervous,” she admits. “I think I’m much more confident in myself now. Definitely more comfortable speaking in front of people. More extroverted and better at being myself and making friends.”
Bonner graduated with a degree in engineering from Campbell University on May 9, roughly 45 months after agreeing to take part in an interview with Campbell Magazine for a feature on the Class of 2026, a group of freshmen whose high school experiences were marred greatly by a global pandemic and a group that saw college as a chance to rediscover their social side.
She was among 12 soon-to-be students randomly selected for the feature, and she was among a handful still at Campbell four years later — the retention rate skewed because several were student athletes, many of whom left via the NCAA’s transfer portal. A native of the small town of Farmville, North Carolina (located just outside of Greenville), Bonner was accepted into Campbell’s Honors Program upon her arrival in 2022, and from Day 1, she immersed herself into her classes and labs in the School of Engineering.
She revealed in her freshman interview that engineering was the reason she chose Campbell: “My grandpa was an engineer, and so was my dad,” she said. “So it’s been in my family, and engineering just really interests me.”
Bonner took accelerated math and engineering courses at Wayne Community College while in high school, and she chose Campbell because of the promise of a hands-on curriculum and the opportunity to immerse herself in labs and projects in her first semester.
“On the first day of class, instead of getting a textbook, you get a toolbox, and you’re making circuits on the first day,” she says. “In your freshman first semester, you make a robot that follows a line and has to collect a [rubber[ duck or interact with the other robots to complete a common mission. In the second semester, you have your freshman design project and something called the fish tank project, which everybody’s scared of, but it’s so much fun.”
In four years, Bonner graduated from “fish” to fins for her senior design project, working with two other engineering students and two students from Campbell University’s Doctor of Physical Therapy program to design and build prosthetic fins for swimming for a local man who lost both legs to peripheral artery disease in the last five years. The project involved working with the recipient for months and altering the design based on his comfort level and the efficiency of the fins. The final design was finished just days before the team’s Senior Design Project presentation in April, and Bonner called the experience both educational and fulfilling.
“To see him go from not being able to have any propulsion from his lower body at the beginning to being able to kick and swim again just made me really happy,” Bonner says. “It meant a lot to see that my work could help somebody in that manner, because that’s really my end goal with engineering — to improve the quality of life for others.”
In the fall, Bonner will take another step toward that goal when she enrolls into Duke University’s Master of Engineering in Materials Science program. She says studying engineering at Campbell was the best decision she could have made and tells others who are considering the program to just “do it.”
“The faculty and staff are so great. Their doors are always open,” she says. “The community is there, and it’s really strong. From Day 1, you’re helping each other. It’s just an all-around tight-knit community, and you can’t ask for anything better in engineering.”