Mark Belbin wants MATE competitors this year and every year to know that it’s okay to fail. In his final year of high school, his team missed out on advancing the international competition by just two points in their score. As disappointing as that was, Mark says that it motivated him to join his college team and work even harder.
A native of Newfoundland, Mark was always a science-brained kid. He loved math and physics, but it was joining his middle school’s team to compete at MATE that led him to his real passion: engineering.
“Through MATE, I found out that I liked to build and work with my hands, get physical, and solve problems with math,” he said.
After his first competition in 2011, he competed at MATE all through middle and high school, then joined his university’s team too. He started to shine as a level-headed strategist and leader in high school. He also became the go-to guy to fix a problem when his team was in a pinch. In his second year of high school, his team’s software deleted itself between their mission runs, and he and others had to race against the clock to rewrite the code from scratch to get their vehicle working.
“I know from interacting with other people that when something goes wrong it’s like, ‘We did the best we could, it’s time to give up,’” Mark said. “But the real grit of the competition is when you say, ‘No, we have to keep trying till the very end. The best we can do, we have to do it.’”
That mentality is still valuable to him. In 2021, he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and works for Zoox, an Amazon-owned company working to develop an autonomous robo-taxi. (Think Uber, but minus the driver). He first landed an internship there in college thanks in part to having MATE on his resume, then landed a full-time gig as a hardware systems engineer after graduation.
Clearly, he didn’t let one failure stop him from success—and in fact, Mark says he probably wouldn’t be where he is today if his team hadn’t failed that day. It instilled a stronger drive to win in him that he still has today.
