Her Story
About Valeria
I started my career as a mechanical engineering intern at Everest Labs in 2020, and over the past few years have grown into my current role as a senior robotics engineer. Being at a startup, the role changes have been kind of informal and organic, with transitions between teams and responsibilities as the product evolved. What I'm really proud of is the work we do at Everest - making sure the robots are effectively making our customers happy and really achieving the mission of helping recycling actually happen. That makes me really excited. On the side, I continue working in mechanical design through Aprumo Design, my company, where I've been hiring students to give them work experience and fostering relationships with other startups in the area so I can help them with their early prototyping needs. I would say my biggest achievement is being able to pay it forward to other students as interns of mine. My educational journey started at community college out of need, because I didn't speak English well as a recent immigrant and needed to save money, figure out the college system, and catch up with credits. Through community college, I found amazing mentors and programs that helped me understand what it looked like to be educated in the U.S. and receive financial aid when my family didn't have money to pay for school. I transferred to Santa Clara University to get my mechanical engineering bachelor's in 2018, and stayed on for my master's to pursue robotics and mechatronics, finishing in 2021. Working closely with the university on hands-on projects and through my own self-employment work at Aprumo Design is how I was able to form my professional career - it was through projects that I understood this was the field for me.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Valeria
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say my family is amazing in terms of being very fearless, and I kind of took a lot of that from them. Being in a new country, it's not easy to start from scratch, and my parents opened a body shop along with my family 14 years ago. Now they're very successful, they employ 20 people, and just seeing them thrive like that really helps - just to look up to someone like that, you know? Knowing that there really isn't any excuse to not pursue what a lot of people come to the U.S. for, which is a new opportunity.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice I've received is to make decisions based on principle - to always check myself and my impulses, and not to listen to my emotions so much. I mean that in terms of delaying gratification and thinking about what the end goal is. I can think back to not wanting to do my homework, or wanting to be part of other organizations when I didn't have the time, or giving up family time because I had to apply to scholarships - things like that.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would tell them not to feel insecure. When I felt insecure, I would share that with my other colleagues, and I found that they felt the same way, so I was never alone in those thoughts. Anyone else that seemed to be ahead of me was just because they had a little more information that I could find myself as well. Don't feel insecure - everybody's feeling like that. A lot of us are just better at hiding it, I think.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge I've seen, at least in the startup world, is that we move so fast with all the engineers that there's no way we're going to be able to cover all the holes. There are a lot of systemic issues working as a team that's moving way too fast to catch the issues of the product, make the customer happy, and be able to continue improving and innovating. It's a lot to do with small teams, and that's what Silicon Valley startups are expected to do - just move fast and fail fast, I think. But the biggest opportunity is that there are so many new technologies coming up, and I know there are things that you and I cannot even imagine will come up in a couple years. The biggest opportunity is what's coming - the things we don't know that we don't know. A lot of industries are going to come out of that new technology, mostly with AI and the different applications that we couldn't even fathom right now. It's an exciting time for me in technology, and there are so many opportunities, it's just kind of hard to keep up with all of them.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
For me, it's choice and agency - being able to choose what I want to do based on what matters, versus feeling limited by finances, education level, demographics, or geography even. So education falls within that, and financial wellness falls within that, right? Agency and freedom are probably number one, which I think this country really helps with. And family is also one of them, not in that order, but definitely one of them.
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