Student Spotlights – Clayton King

For Clayton King, a second semester undergraduate nursing student, service is a north star and an engine of motivation. As a young adult, he was a volunteer firefighter with his father and brother, helping their community in northern Indiana. Prior to beginning his nursing education at ECU, he served in the US Navy as a corpsman, providing health and dental care to Sailors and Marines at the Naval Health Clinic in Quantico, Va. 

Clayton has fully embraced ECU’s mission of Service. If you have gotten lunch from the food trucks outside the CON building on Thursdays, that is in large part due to his muddling through the paperwork and regulations to allow the food businesses to set up on the Health Sciences Campus. He is also working with nursing clinical instructor, and Holistic Health Organization sponsor Susan Lally, to establish a healing garden on the HSC which will incorporate local herbs and edible plants that promote healthful lifestyles. 

While not in class, Clayton and his husband are working to turn 15 acres of underdeveloped land near Winterville into a permaculture farm. They have a burgeoning menagerie of farm animals and will soon begin planting an orchard of fruit trees in hopes of fostering a culture of sustainable agriculture in Pitt County. 

Clayton hopes to join his brother, who also served in the Navy as a nurse, on the path to being a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist. While he hopes to be accepted in the ECU program one day, his longer-term plans are to continue to find ways to serve.