We had the good fortune of connecting with Mia Beltran and Jason Nguyen and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Mia Beltran and Jason Nguyen, is your business focused on helping the community? If so, how?
As part of FIRST, TitanBot is always looking for new ways to bring the community of FIRST Robotics Competition into new educational opportunities, engineering experiences, and even supporting those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged. Our most important outreach event of the year is our Girls Inspiring Real Leadership in STEAM Conference, in which we work together with our school’s Society of Women Engineers Next Chapter to invite young students from throughout San Diego to listen to our selected speakers with experience in diverse fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics. With this event we also aim to foster education in STEAM while also creating and ensuring equitable opportunities for inclusivity in male dominated fields. Our event was also live streamed and reached communities globally, with more than 180 registered participants including in-person participants and online viewers. Additionally, for over 10 years our team has hosted FIRST Lego League tournaments engaging with and assisting thousands of elementary school students in their journey through STEAM. These FLL students are able to showcase their unique and brilliant creations while talking about their own community outreach as TitanBot recognizes these young minds and demonstrates how they can continue to further their careers in FIRST after elementary school such as through to high school with a multitude of TitanBot members having a background in FIRST. Despite the ramifications of a global pandemic, TitanBot has stayed active assisting South Bay FRC teams such as Team 8537 the MechanicAnts by skirmishing with and inviting them to do a robot demonstration at our Girls Inspiring Real Leadership in STEAM Conference; We are looking towards bolstering more new and dormant South Bay teams . Since July, we have participated in 3 robot demonstrations throughout our community to engage larger audiences and emphasize the importance of STEAM education. Furthermore, our team continues to implement seasonal food and supply drives for our local women’s shelter, and volunteers in Feeding San Diego to help distribute nutritious food to those facing hunger. Lastly, TitanBot constantly mentors and supports the development of our local middle school’s robotics team, and has logged over 250 hours of community service since the beginning of summer.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Leading a team of around 90 students is no easy task to accomplish, but with the support of 8 department directors and Jason, our team CEO, we all are able to communicate efficiently and find support within each other to succeed within our roles and make TitanBot an unforgettable experience to all our team members.

Jason Nguyen:
TitanBot is a high school FRC team that operates as a business structure with the Chief Executive Officer at the top leading and working with our team’s eight departments in engineering, business, and marketing. As the team CEO my responsibilities include making announcements, executive decisions, resolving colleague conflicts, coordinating with our advisor, mentors, parents, business partners, alumni, and a whole lot of planning for team events. I’ve always been more of a hands-on learning through experience person previously being involved almost solely in the our team’s electronics, programming, AV needs and so my current role has required a large shift of my attention to management and leadership which I see as a new opportunity to grow in areas like public speaking where I am not as comfortable partaking in. Looking back recently, I am most proud of our team’s performance last competition season as we had a rather unique design that got us into playoffs with my contribution as the lead team technician. In terms of the rest of the school year I am most looking forward to all the problems to overcome and memories I’ll make in the winter and spring during build and competition season. On my path to be where I am today being a student leader and roboticist I’ve likely spent over a thousand hours participating in robotics and STEAM related clubs stepping out of my comfort zone, growing as a person and colleague along the way. If you don’t reach out to people or step out of your comfort zone you won’t grow as significantly as you would otherwise, you may not know it but if you just ask people will be happy to help you strive for opportunities. 90% of the work it just showing up. Be kinetic, there’s a reason why we say people have potential and that’s the opportunity to utilize it! And after you try you will eventually fail, but don’t let that deter you from success.

Mia Beltran:
As this year’s Outreach Department Director, my role within the team consists of planning and leading our team’s community service events. Making up a big part of the FIRST community, outreach events make an impact not only in the young students from local communities and around the world, but we also host these opportunities with the goal of creating a greater good and using our advantages to support socioeconomically disadvantaged groups of people. At the beginning of this semester, I planned our largest outreach event of the year, which hadn’t been hosted in-person since 2019 due to COVID. With the help of other team leaders and our amazing mentors, we were able to promote our Conference extensively and get the biggest turnout recorded from past years. I learned many valuable skills varying from public speaking and online marketing, but teamwork was the determining factor of success for our 8th Annual GIRLS Conference. My biggest advice for anyone is to never give up on anything that creates a spark of interest, although the journey might be difficult, the feeling of accomplishment and joy you create makes the experiences unforgettable. My personal favorite part of my job is to see the faces of excitement of children of all ages while being engaged in one of our events, it truly makes the hard planning of our community service events worth our effort.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
If you are visiting San Diego, Balboa Park and the San Diego Zoo are incredible places to spend time with family, the views, food, and diverse wildlife make this an excellent consideration for the trip. The San Diego Air and Space Museum has wonderful exhibits and a great activity for all ages. For our beaches, La Jolla and Coronado offer numerous activities, stunning sunset views, and an amazing variety of food.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
We would like to dedicate this to Mr. Foust, our amazing TitanBot club advisor. Not only is Mr. Foust an incredible teacher and mentor, but he has dedicated himself to making sure everyone finds their place inside and outside the classroom almost in a father-figure like way. His 10+ years with TitanBot has garnered a community of young students ready and comfortable to explore different avenues of engineering and other studies. He never fails to demonstrate his desire to make a difference in the lives of all of our team members. Mr. Foust is truly an inspiration and a role model to all of Eastlake High School’s engineering students.

Website: titanbot.org

Instagram: @titanbot2543

Linkedin: Mia Beltran: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mia-beltran-070013241 | Jason Nguyen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-nguyen-43050223b

Youtube: TitanBot

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