Meet Zach: “A Better Direction & A Clear Path.”

Zach Baird graduated from Casa Grande with no interest in college. A year at Keysight Technologies changed his mind - and gave him a major.

Featuring Zach B.

Zach Baird was finished with school before school was finished with him.

"I felt kind of done by my senior year," he says.

That's not an unusual thing for a graduating senior to feel, and it's usually treated as a problem to push through. Zach did something else with it. Instead of enrolling somewhere he didn't want to be, he took a gap year — a structured one, with a paycheck attached.

Sonoma Corps starts with a career preparation class during senior year and continues into a paid internship with a local company after graduation. The point is to put the year between high school and whatever comes next to work: real job, real employer, real skills, and enough time inside an industry to find out whether it's yours.

Zach landed at Keysight Technologies, where he spent the year on engineering work — building and testing equipment used by major companies. The tasks were technical and the stakes were real, and something started to shift.

His mother, Elizabeth, watched it happen.

"When he graduated, he wasn't interested in college. This internship was a really great opportunity," she says. "It's been a year, and he's very excited about college and has a better direction and a clear path."

Part of what changed was proximity. Zach wasn't reading about mechanical engineering; he was standing next to mechanical engineers every day, watching what the job actually consists of.

"I've been working with mechanical engineers, so I can see what my future career could look like."

He's now enrolled at Santa Rosa Junior College and plans to study mechanical engineering.

His supervisor at Keysight, Diego LaTorre, saw the same growth from the other side of it — and describes something more than a student getting by. He points to Zach's dependability, his organization, and his attention to detail as the reasons he became an asset to the team, and notes that in his final two months, Zach had moved into training new team members himself.

That's the part worth pausing on. He arrived as an intern who wasn't sure he wanted to keep learning. He left teaching other people how to do the work.

Zach's story is a good illustration of what a year of hands-on experience can do for a student who hasn't found their footing yet — not by talking them into a path, but by letting them stand on one long enough to see it. Graduates who complete a Sonoma Corps internship are also eligible to apply for post-secondary scholarships through CTE Foundation's partnership with 10,000 Degrees.

He was done by his senior year. Two years later, he's an engineering student who already knows what the job looks like.