Maria Arredondo jokes that it was her fate to work with electricity.

In seventh grade, her middle school assigned her to the electrical shop, one of the few girls in the class. And in the Navy, she picked the job “EM” because the training was in Chicago, not knowing that EM stood for Electrician’s Mate.

“I think it was my destiny to be an electrician,” said Arredondo, a Protection & Control (P&C) Technician for Oncor Transmission in Forney, Texas.

Arredondo, who grew up in Mexico and Houston, covers a broad territory today for Oncor, servicing over 50 substations in east Texas.

“When I graduated from high school, I felt like my family needed a little bit of help, so joining the military allowed me to do that and also grow and learn a lot of things,” she said. Arredondo also got to see some of the world beyond Houston.

The Navy assigned Arredondo to the Japan-based USS Essex right out of electrician’s school. A few years later, she moved to California and aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, a sprawling aircraft carrier.

After the Navy, Arredondo returned to Houston and enrolled at the University of Houston, studying electrical power engineering technology. She graduated with honors while also serving in the Naval Reserve.

Her first brush with Oncor came during a career fair in her junior year. Talking to an Oncor recruiter, Arredondo said she initially hesitated because the job wasn’t in Houston.

“He said, why don’t you come and do the internship and see how that goes,” Arredondo recalled. “I was like, ‘OK, it’s good experience.’ I came and did the internship. And then, I fell in love with the company.”

Oncor assigned her to the Forney office for her internship. Her coworkers “took care of each other and made sure everybody was safe,” she said.

“Everyone there who I worked with was very knowledgeable, and they were not shy to share their knowledge,” Arredondo said. “And I loved that.” When she graduated a few months later, she returned to a full-time job with Oncor and to Forney.

Arredondo said the Navy made her feel like what she did mattered, a feeling she lost when she became a full-time student. That all changed when she joined Oncor.

“Now, I work in the Transmission field and I feel like what I do matters,” she said. “Everybody is relying on us to provide them with the electricity, so I feel like I’m part of something really big right now. It makes me feel more proud of my job.”