As the son of a Spanish father, who was a first generation college student, and a mother raised on a farm in Texas, Peter Zaballos grew up in a hardworking family. But it wasn’t until he attended Diablo Valley College that he began to discover his own potential to craft a future in marketing and technology.
“DVC was where I was given the opportunity to understand what potential was inside of me. I got the benefit of some great professors who nurtured that and encouraged me,” Zaballos said.
Zaballos was born in nearby Castro Valley in 1958. When he was in eighth grade, his family moved to the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland. His parents expected him to work hard to achieve a strong education and, with it, a prosperous career.
“You could be an engineer, an accountant, a doctor or a lawyer,” said Zaballos, recalling his family’s philosophy of work. “There’s a linear path from your major to a career.”
But academics were never his strong suit as a kid. Despite his best efforts, Zaballos’s grades were often unsatisfactory to his teachers and his parents alike. He was the only one in his graduating class at The College Preparatory School in Oakland who did not go straight into a four-year university.
But after entering DVC in 1976, Zaballos’s life would change forever due to the guidance he said he received from his differential equations professor, William R. Scofield.
Scofield taught in the mathematics department here from 1962 to 1990. “He always taught the basic classes because he thought it [was] important to help those struggling or [those] afraid of math,” said Scofield’s daughter, Paula Cox, writing to Zaballos in an email exchange earlier this year.
(Photograph of Schofield, courtesy of the email forwarded to The Inquirer sent originally by his daughter, Paula Cox)
“He was just an amazing professor,” said Zaballos. “He changed my life, because he was the first one that told me, ‘You could be really good at this.’”
In addition to the support of his professor, Zaballos was surprised and excited by the change in atmosphere from his previous private institutions.
”I just remember that all the people I was around were so grateful for this opportunity to improve their lives,” said Zaballos. “We all worked together. In almost every class, there would be a study group in a form.”
After three years at DVC, Zaballos transferred to UC Berkeley in 1979. Upon graduating with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, he went directly into marketing and technology. His first job was at Fairchild Semiconductor as a product manager for the company’s Emitter-Coupled-Logic line of semiconductor logic devices.
Later, the company’s CEO along with several other Fairchild executives left to co-found LSI Logic. Within a year, Zaballos was recruited to work there as a member of the marketing organization.
Zaballos said he went through “seven years of this amazing experience [with the company] and I thought, ‘I need to get some perspective.’” So, in 1989, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and acquired a Master of Science (SM) in Administration.
Even though his GPA coming out of Berkeley was only 2.3, he said the school admired the experience he had carried with him from the technology start-up companies. And over the next 40 years, Zaballos developed his career by transforming a variety of technology companies with his own hands-on leadership.
“If I look back at my career, all the amazing companies I worked at had a really good idea. There were a thousand reasons why it wasn’t going to work, and one or two reasons why it was,” he said, “and I was fortunate to be with the people where we only saw the one or two reasons.”
It wasn’t until late 2019 when Zaballos would become the founder of his passion project, the Diamante Scholars program.
According to its website, Diamante Scholars “is focused on helping high-potential high school students find their path to higher education and career success.” Its first class of high school seniors was recruited in February 2020 with the goal of preparing students for their transition into Diablo Valley College for the Fall 2020 semester.
The Diamante Scholars program holds eight seminars over the course of two years, some of which include crash courses in lifestyle tips such as how to become resilient in the face of failure, how to use failure as motivation and data, and how to think of yourself as your own personal brand.
“It’s about helping students discover the unlocked potential they have,” said Zaballos. “Our trademark tagline is, ‘Do what others doubt,’ because it’s helping those students find their own voice and their own potential in the face of other people who may not believe in them.”
This year, the Diamante Scholars program is about to send its sixth class of 40 students to Diablo Valley College. The reason for the program’s success, according to Zaballos, is “because DVC supported it, and because DVC completely brought it to life.”
“Really good ideas, really bright people, are going to run into adversity,” said Zaballos, “so learn how to use that as motivation and fuel.”
