May 6, 2025 – They might be interns who spend hours a week learning on the job at Amarillo’s Bell Flight, but Peyton Thompson and Dayanara Fernandez aren’t exactly coworkers.
“I literally never see her,” laughs Peyton.
“We’re in different buildings,” agrees Dayanara.
As AmTech interns at Bell, Peyton, an Amarillo High School senior, works with liaison engineers, and Dayanara, a Palo Duro High School senior, works in planning. The experience they earn in high school is coveted even at the college level.
“I’ve heard Bell’s lines at the college fairs are pretty long,” says Peyton. “I’ve talked to some people who go to Texas Tech, and the Lockheed Martin line, for example, is a two-hour wait for a 5-minute conversation. That’s going to be me next year.”
Peyton has always liked fixing things, but the engineering bug really bit when he entered his first robotics competition as a fifth-grader at Windsor Elementary. “We were a first-year team, but we got to go to state and compete with all the kids with NASA engineer dads,” he recalls.
At AmTech, Peyton got to take his robotics obsession to all-new heights and inspired a future that might include a pioneering arm of robotics.“Hands down, being on the robotics team has been the best thing here,” he says. “There’s a need for robots to help people, so I’d like to either join a company that does that or start my own and be a pioneer in that field.”
For Dayanara, it took a little longer for the light to come on…literally and figuratively.
“It’s like a metaphor in my own brain,” she laughs. “I did this light fixture project for my electrical tech class and had to build a commercial residential light. And I remember how excited I was when the light turned on. It was so bright. At that point, I was like, yeah, I think this is for me.”
Dayanara and Peyton, who already don’t run into each other as interns in the same company, will have another chance to bump into each other next year. They’ll be engineering classmates at Texas Tech, where Dayanara will major in electrical engineering and Peyton in mechanical engineering. Dayanara is Palo Duro’s salutatorian and will graduate high school with an associate’s degree in her pocket, thanks to dual credit. Peyton leaves with at least 30 hours of college credit on his transcript, making him a sophomore when he hits campus in August.
Not that it’s a competition.
“For the record, I committed to Tech first,” grins Peyton.
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