In high school, I joined this club called MESA, which is local to our area. We had engineering competitions once a year, building mousetrap cars and gliders. That was the only STEM program that we had in high school. Besides that, no. Just fixing things around the house and getting the Wi-Fi to work again. Really, I’ve only started working more with machines for the past two years, because I bought my own truck — I’m always working on it because it’s always breaking down.

Growing up in Chualar, you’ve always been surrounded by farms, so what first got you interested in agriculture?

My parents, they work in agriculture. My dad does all tractor work, like fertilizing and plowing everything. And my mom, she does weeding. I got my first job because of my dad — they needed workers for the summer.

Could you talk a bit more about those work experiences?

When I was 14, I started off setting up irrigation systems. It was laid back, because it was a small crew of four other high school kids and we were really just goofing around. We didn’t really get paid much, but it was fun! After that, I started broccoli harvesting, which I did up until 2020. That was a lot harder, but it paid more.

This summer, 2021, I moved out of the fields and I got to do an internship with a company there in Salinas, which was also agriculture-related. They make these weeding machines that use A.I. to detect weeds from the good plants, and that was cool.

How has this work inspired your career goals? Why do you think developing agricultural machinery is important?

I want to work in harvesters, A.I. harvesters. Things like broccoli, you have to be picking which head is good and which isn’t. Because I worked a lot with broccoli in high school, I’ve gotten really good at picking and choosing really fast. That’s where A.I. comes in, and that’s what I want to develop.