Kevin Arrieta got into robotics to avoid getting into trouble.
Arrieta said he joined the robotics club at his Compton high school after the teacher who ran it gave him an ultimatum.
"I had gotten in with the wrong crowd," he said. "I had a physics teacher who told me, 'Join my robotics club or I'm calling your mom.'"
In the club, Arrieta found he loved working with sensors and doing programming, and he was good at it.
"You have an engineering mind and you don't even know it," his teacher said.
Arrieta put that engineering mind to work at UC Merced, where he graduated in 2024. Now a senior automation engineer at a company that works with retail giant Amazon, Arrieta recently returned to campus to talk about his career and offer advice to students in an electrical engineering class taught by Professor Sarah Kurtz.
"Get your hands dirty," he told them. "Do personal projects, do research."
He also encouraged them to make use of the resources uniquely available at UC Merced.
"Speak to your professors," he said. "The relationship you can have with them is something you won't see on a lot of campuses. Take advantage of that."
The path to success isn't always smooth. In his third year of college, Arrieta found himself running an e-commerce business. He was working about 60 hours a week and struggling to juggle that with his course load. He essentially dropped out of school, and he wasn't sure if he wanted to finish.
"I'm a person of faith, so I prayed about it," he said. He recommitted to his education and landed internships with Tesla at sites in Texas and New York, as well as a job at Amazon.
"I was taking five engineering courses, working the night shift at Amazon and weekends somewhere else," he said. "It's important to understand your bandwidth, how much you can handle."
Resilience is also important, he said.
"Apply, apply, apply. I applied to 100 internships and got three offers."
All that work paid off, and when Arrieta graduated, he already had two years of experience.
"I started off straight into management. I've supported six Amazon sites all over the country."
He now works for CNW Services, which provides automation engineering support at an Amazon site in Stockton.
And he's still learning. He showed the students video footage of a robot he created that was supposed to be powered by a PlayStation 4 controller. Except it didn't go anywhere, a problem with a Bluetooth signal. Another remote got the robot to move a little.
"Finally, we got it to work in autonomous mode," Arrieta said. "As an engineer, you're going to have these failures. Things that don't play out the way you want them to play out."
He said students now have the option of majoring in electrical engineering, which wasn't available when he attended UC Merced.
"That person next to you, they're probably going for the same internships you are," he said. "What are you doing to set yourself apart? Home in on your craft and whatever you're learning now, try to carry that into your career."
Kurtz said having a former student who has a similar experience to those now in class is valuable.
"Many of our students are trying to understand what will happen after they finish their degrees," she said. "Kevin's visit was a fantastic opportunity for students to peek into the possibilities for their own futures."
