Ruben Velazquez’s interest in how things work goes back to his childhood when he enjoyed playing with his remotecontrolled cars and wondered what made them go.

“I would always want to modify cars and switch out the tires,” Velazquez said. “I just liked it “cause it peeled out better.”

The fascination grew for the 22-year-old mechanical engineering major who even rebuilt an old dune buggy when he was still in high school. Now Velazquez’s curiosity is taking him places like Texas, where last month he won first place at the National Institute for Leadership Advancement conference held in Dallas.

The annual NILA conference is a leadership training event run by the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, of which Velazquez is the Sacramento State chapter president.

Velazquez called the experience a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and explained how getting there was not so easy.

Born in Mexico, he moved to the United States with his family when he was young and settled in Arbuckle, a small town near Woodland. Velazquez graduated from Pierce High School in 2005 and chose to attend Sac State for practical reasons.

“It was the closest university … and it had a lot of outreach programs,” Velazquez said.

Velazquez said while he loved working on cars, he knew that he would have to attend college in order to one day have the kind of life he dreamed about.

“You have a lot of options when you go to school,” Velazquez said.

Velazquez started out improving his educational outlook in learning skills programs and joined the fraternity Nu Alpha Kappa.

“That really developed my skills in leadership,” Velazquez said about his time in the fraternity.

Recently he has taken on many leadership projects, including creating one for Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement with his friend Laura Gonzalez.

“I had an idea to start a mentoring program using MESA,” Gonzalez said. “The plan was to find students that were part of MESA during their high school career and were in four-year or community college and connect them with MESA high school students.”

Gonzalez and Velazquez’s program targets Latinos and other minority groups to increase the numbers attending higher education.

“We do work a lot with programs that advocate for higher education,” Gonzalez said.

“That’s been a reoccurring theme and issue that we always advocate for.”

It was Velazquez’s commitment to mentor younger students that caused him and Gonzalez to meet three years ago. Both were a part of the College Assistance Migrant Program, a first-year counseling program with courses focused on introduction to college life and career or personality building.

“Students always come back, alumni always come back, so I met him as an alumni,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez’s observation of Velazquez being a serious student is one that he might agree with.

“It takes me a while to learn things – it’s the reason why I’m in the library most of the day,” Velazquez said.

Velazquez continues to gain engineering experience with his job as an engineering technician at Folsom Dam.

He has been working there for nearly a year and a half, assisting other engineers with research and development.

Recently he helped design a safety platform for his workplace, but is restricted from discussing the details of its conceptual design because it is a federal government project.

Mariana Rivera, Velazquez’s former MESA adviser, predicts he will one day use the skills he has learned at Sac State working for a company that gives back to others.

“He brings the skills he’s learned over the past few years to the SHPE chapter,” Rivera said. “It’s something (students) take with them when they leave the community.”

Velazquez’s colleagues say that he can expect to have a really good year and are excited to see him continuously reach every goal he has set for himself.

“I admire him a lot as a friend and I know he’ll be doing great things once he leaves Sacramento State,” Gonzalez said.

Velazquez, in the meantime, continues to pursue his dreams and has more or less summed up his success to one simple factor: hard work.

Julia Baum can be reached at [email protected].