From six lost admissions to becoming a senior software engineer

Macbobby Chibuzor’s journey into tech didn’t start the usual way. After facing financial challenges and multiple lost admissions, he found his way into Mechatronics Engineering almost by chance. What started as an interest in building things, inspired by watching Iron Man, grew into a real passion for learning and creating.

While at FUNAAB, he quickly realized that school alone wouldn’t prepare him for the real world. He took his education into his own hands, studying robotics, software engineering, and embedded systems on his own, and even earned paid projects from companies abroad. Along the way, he learned that resilience, curiosity, and surrounding yourself with supportive communities can be just as important as grades or talent.

In this first part of our AMTES Alumni Series interview, Macbobby reflects on how he discovered his path, what drove him to push past setbacks, and why self-directed learning and building systems for growth shaped his journey in tech.

Hi, Ghost! Good afternoon. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this and sharing your story with the readers. I really appreciate you giving us your time. I think we can get straight into things. The first question I have is, why did you choose to study mechatronics, and what got you interested in the field?

My answer is going to be funny. It was something unexpected, and I think I’ll have to give you a back story about my search for admission.

First of all, I dropped out of school after SS1. I didn’t move on to SS2 because my dad claimed that he could not afford the fees. He didn’t want me to switch schools to a cheaper one, but he also couldn’t continue paying my fees. So, I had to drop out of school, learn phone repairs and then use my proceeds from that to pay for textbooks.

I remember losing this chemistry textbook I had bought, and it was so painful. After that, I bought other textbooks, like two or three kinds of physics textbooks and mathematics, hidden facts, all that stuff. After buying them, I sat for my WAEC, which, thankfully, my dad paid for. So I took WAEC at the time when I was supposed to be in SS2. I passed everything but Chemistry.

I applied to study petroleum engineering at a Polytechnic, the Petroleum Training Institute in Warri. I wrote the entrance exam, which was like JAMB, and I passed. I think I got 70 out of 100, and I used awaiting results to get the admission. This time I used NECO, and I focused on chemistry, but it was cancelled for my center because somebody was caught spying. I resumed school, but when the results came out, I discovered I had failed chemistry, so I had to drop out. Chemistry is quite important for petroleum engineering.

The second time, I think this was in 2015 or 16, I tried applying again to the same school. I got the admission, and I scored 74 in the entrance exam. What caused me to lose this admission was the strike that year. When it was called off, I was already processing JAMB to another unit.

I lost many admissions, about 5 or 6. The courses I was choosing for these admissions were electrical engineering and petroleum engineering. I didn’t have a particular choice. I just wanted to go to school, finish up, and get a better job. If you are living in the South, especially close to the Niger Delta, then you most likely want to be a petroleum engineer. Back then, as a graduate, you get 700K as your base salary.

Wow, that’s crazy.

Yeah, it’s crazy. My first contact with Mechatronics was actually when I applied to FUTMINNA for electrical engineering. I got the admission. My UTME score was 200, and the cutoff mark for electrical engineering was 180. I think I was even in the first batch, if I remember clearly.

My dad was at work one day, and he spoke with his friend and discovered that he also got into the same school for a course called Mechatronics Engineering. My dad did a little bit of research and was interested in it. He called me and told me to also research the course before he got home, so we’d talk. He got home, we spoke about it, and I actually did like the course.

He said he wanted me to switch to Mechatronics. I thought about how that would be possible, and the best option at the time was for me to switch departments after 200L. My dad disagreed and said he wouldn’t pay the fees if I were studying electrical engineering. If he were paying any fees, it would be for Mechatronics.

He went on to get a change of course form without my knowledge and changed my course of study to Mechatronics. I still hate the JAMB guy who did that to date. I didn’t like that he went ahead to do it without advising my dad. I ended up losing my admission because the cutoff mark for Mechatronics was 210. It was also very competitive. My UTME score was 200. That was why I lost it.

He tried to fix it, but ended up losing money in the process. He paid a lecturer he wasn’t supposed to, but we found out the person didn’t even work in the school. That made him angry, and he abandoned my education. I had to pick things up myself.

I actually like the idea of Mechatronics because around that period, I was watching a lot of Marvel movies. I saw Iron Man, and I fell in love with him and everything. And I’m like, “Tony Stark, I’d like to be something like that”. I think that while in school, I started something I call Mac Industries, which was inspired by Stark Industries.

So yeah, that was how I chose Mechatronics and also picked up an interest in it.

Your story about falling in love with Mechatronics through Tony Stark and Iron Man, I feel like I really resonate with. Well, I mean, I was already in Mechatronics, but then, I started watching Marvel movies. I even just saw Iron Man and I was wowed.

We’ve understood how you got interested in mechatronics and why you chose to study it. So now I want to ask, what was your academic journey like? Were there moments when you struggled, and how did you push through them? And also, as a bonus question, what was your most memorable moment as a student in FUNAAB?

My academic journey was still filled with laughter, disappointment, fear, and self-doubt. I got a lot of self-confidence.

Yeah, very understandable.

I got into FUNAAB through direct entry, so I started with a very great GP, let me put it that way. I was a four-pointer, emphasis on was. In my IJMB (A-levels), I had an A in Maths and Physics and a B in Chemistry. This gave me a total of 15 points out of 16, making my GP very high. I was able to maintain that in my first semester at FUNAAB. Towards the end of my second semester, I started developing different interests.

I think I can say this because I’m a graduate. I discovered that what I would learn in school would either be obsolete or not make anybody money. During that time, there used to be a Mechatronics Engineering Association for Nigeria, and I managed to make friends with a lot of them. Many of them have actually left the country now.

I met and spoke with a lot of them. A good number of them built really nice projects. I remember one lady, Folarin. She built a smart mirror that could do what you see in the movies. It was really nice.

Wow!

Yeah. I met many of them and even got my internship placement through some of them. I also got into embedded systems communities in Nigeria through some of them. One thing I also noticed with most of them was that the majority of the things they learned from school were obsolete by the time they made it out of school. That’s one. Two, after graduating, they ended up not doing mechatronics.

Mechatronics is basically undergraduate robotics, and robotics has a lot of branches. Most of them specialized early. Some went into the software aspect of things, or hardware, while some are doing other things. Some are just automating systems like gates, doors, and houses. Some are into cars. They all just branched out and focused on different things. It has a little bit of mechatronics in it, yes, but it was not the main thing that we’d been dreaming of when we got admission.

With that in mind, I started taking my education into my own hands. I started studying. I put together a course, and I should still have it on my Notion. It was a general road map for self-study from 2 universities that were offering mechatronics. One was from Manchester, I think, and the other was MIT. I merged their courses that related to robotics, and then I started taking those courses during my personal time or during the holidays.

I noticed a lot of similarities between what we were studying in school and what was in the curriculum I had prepared. I found that the only problem was that what we’re studying in school was limited to theory. The second problem was that we were just scratching the surface. The curriculum for the other two schools was also bachelor’s, but they went further.

For example, they did an introduction to computer science for us in I think 200 level? In CSC 201, the only thing they taught us was memory stuff in computers and an overview of the C++ programming language. The curriculum from those schools showed something really serious.

So, my journey was trying to pave a particular path that would amount to me having a complete education. That was what I was striving for. So I end up derailing from schoolwork. I started to focus more on my personal studies of the same course, and that was when my GP started to reduce. I started skipping school to focus on my own stuff.

In 200 level towards 300 level, when I was doing all of this study, I discovered semiconductors, and I wrote an article on it. I submitted that article as a draft to a company called Vivolva in Germany, leading me to get a gig with them that was paying $1000. They paid for that article. I realized I could start using the little I know from school to make money. I continued and got more gigs from Japan and all of that. Those required me to have more knowledge of hardware to complete my articles.

But the problem is that in Nigeria, hardware is difficult and expensive to come by. It was a challenge getting stores that sold industry-standard parts.

It really is.

Seeing as that was a challenge, I discussed with my friends and I concluded that since the software aspect is also necessary, I would just focus on that. software aspect. That was how I got into software engineering. I did learnt C, C++, Arduino and the likes. I even helped some final-year people back then with their projects. Yeah, made cool cash from all of that. That was how software engineering just took me.

On my most memorable moment as a student of FUNAAB, nothing really jumps to the top of my head right now that was really amazing. It is really outstanding. I had a lot of down moments in school. I did have up moments too, but I see finally graduating as my most memorable moment, having that freedom.

I still remember how it went. We wrote a difficult paper. We came out happy. We signed on each other. We climbed that rock in the middle of the school. That was memorable.

Thank you so much for sharing this story. What you said about the curriculum and learning obsolete stuff, I think it’s also something that I’ve come to realise as well. I mean, I sort of had an idea from people that I spoke to before getting admission. It was when I actually got into the system that I realized how bad it was, and I started finding other things to do. I didn’t want it to be that I would just spend five years doing something and not be able to make something of myself afterwards. So that’s actually really relatable as well.

I think that also brings me to my next question, which is, a lot of people wait to feel ready before trying something new. What gave you the courage to start learning software seriously and then later go into such a specialized space like DeFi?

There were a lot of reasons why I did that. I got the courage from the fact that I had eyes watching me. From my 200-level towards 300-level, I already started assuming responsibilities both in the software engineering space, like in the Google Developer Student Club. I was the co-lead with Steven. There were colleagues in my set as well who were counting on me, looking up to me, and rooting for me. I felt a sort of personal pressure to amount to something.

I went on to make friends with people who were better than me, and then I made plans. There are two kinds of people: people who plan their day, their week, their month and year. And then there are those who live spontaneously and who believe in spontaneity. I belong to the former category. I plan myself. I put down my expectations from my year, from my month and all of that and then push myself to achieve these things.

Every year, I have this particular thing I want to learn, and I just chase after it. By the end of the year, maybe 2-3 months before the year ends, I review these goals. If I’ve not achieved them, I double down on them. Being responsible and accountable helped me.

In terms of like being specialized in the DeFi space that I’m currently in, this was what helped me. In 2021, two of my friends were developing an interest in blockchain, and I caught the interest too. This was because I was the leader of our little accountability group, and I needed to be able to share my own insights, chip in on the conversations they were having about Web 3. I also needed to ask them what they’ve done, how they were able to surmount challenges, if they needed help and how I could help. I wanted to be able to help them as I was doing very well in the backend space in Web 2.

I wasn’t too serious with it in 2021, but in 2022, I discovered it was a gold mine, and I took it more seriously.

You know, we usually have these guys that make it in this space, and then they start to give motivation. I see these things, and it works for them, but I didn’t want to start my own little follower discipleship program from that. I just kept to myself. One thing I buy from those guys is that if you are coming from a small place and you are still thinking mediocre, you are just setting yourself up for failure. So I didn’t have to wait to feel ready.

The truth about starting something is that you start it before you get the motivation to continue. You don’t just wait for motivation to come before you start something. Motivation is not the igniting force. It is the continuity force. Let me just put it that way, even if it doesn’t make sense. So yes, I did not feel ready. I still get scared a lot of times when I start something new. I still feel like I’m probably not going to succeed. This probably is not for me. I still feel that way. There are times I see some people talking, having some conversations, taking up some roles, seeing amazing things people are doing in this space, and I feel like an imposter.

I still feel that till today. But that’s what it means to be human. You can’t be perfect. You can’t be 100% ready.

Wow, I think you gave such a beautiful end to your response to that question. I just want to quickly go back to your point of having friends around you that really motivated you to do more than you were doing. I think it’s very important. I also have friends like that. They always push me when I’m having down moments, and I feel like I can’t dream big. They remind me that I should even dream bigger than I’m scared of dreaming at the moment. That’s actually really important. I’m glad you had that and that they pushed you, and you guys have grown together to where you are now.

I have something small to chip in to that, and it’s basically systems. Earlier this year, I discovered something called a system. Not a mechatronics system, but templates that guide you. Systems are things that you put in place, and then they start putting you in place in return. Let’s take reading as an example. You know, I founded a book club in school. After I graduated from school, my rate of reading declined a lot because of work and because of freedom.

Freedom is very, very somehow, so I wanted to work on this. What I had in mind was when I go to the gym or when I resume work, an hour after I finish one activity, I’d pair it with another activity. Going back to our example, I set up a system such that when I want to go to the gym, I first of all read for one hour. Immediately after I’m done reading, I just get up, get ready, and go to the gym.

That was how I paired them. You might get used to it, and it will become a habit. You drop down a book, you pick up the towel, and you go to the gym. Once you set up that kind of system, it just keeps happening.

My friends are people who want the same thing as me. So if I stopped wanting to grow, or wanting to learn something new, I have set up that system where the people I have around me, they will come to the DM, they will come to their status, they will come to where I would see and they will talk about something they just learned. And then I’m like, I need to learn something.

So systems are things that you put in place for them to take over and direct your life. I don’t know how to explain it, but yeah, millions of people utilize something like that. That helped me a lot while in school, especially towards exams and planning when to start reading. I had a plan in place where, towards exams, I’d have three or four people come around because if they didn’t come around, I would not read. They would come around and prepare a curriculum for me to study.

That became a thing for me. At one point, I hated the fact that they were always coming around, but then I realized that it was in so and so semester, so and so years ago that I asked them to please do this thing and set that system in place. Yeah, so that’s that.

That was an amazing addition. On what you said about systems, I read this book, Atomic Habits. I think you’ve probably read it as well. The author also made a similar point. Setting goals is nice and all, but you need to have the systems in place that will make it easy for you to actually achieve those goals. It’s not helpful or productive to set goals and then your system does not accommodate you actually hitting that goal. So the system is actually very important.

You brought up Book Panda, and um, I actually wanted to ask about this as well. It’s not on the list of questions I prepared. Is it fine if I just add one more question?

Yeah, sure, definitely.

Okay, as you said, you started a book club in school called Book Panda. I wanted to ask what brought about that decision, and if you can give us some books that you read and found to be really helpful or that you really enjoyed.

Yeah, great. Book Panda, my beloved. It is probably the most important thing that happened to me in FUNAAB. Back in FUTMinna when I just resumed, I created a community. It was called intelligentsia, and it was for people who claimed to be smart, although I wasn’t.

I had a lot of people on the team. We took courses, basically what RightMinds does in FUNAAB. We organized tutorials to help people pass their exams and everything. I started it, and I was handling everything. We had really gotten deep into the session when all of those things happened with my dad and the admission. So I had to withdraw and started managing it online. I converted it into a library instead where students can ask for textbooks because I was no longer in the school, and there was no point staying around in Niger State.

I converted it into that library, and I’ve been managing it since 2018, but I stopped this year. I wanted to create something like that in FUNAAB. So in April 2021, just after 5-6 months of resumption, I already started thinking about hatching a plan for that kind of intelligentsia. What spurred me to even do it faster was because around school area if you were a baller, you’d probably go to night parties. If you were a church person, you’d only go to all nights in church. There was no activity in school area that was meant for students.

The only options available to hang out were to go to a club or a lounge like Chillbay at Zoo or Old Trafford. If you didn’t explore these options, then you don’t go anywhere throughout the week; you just go to classes. I didn’t know about communities like JCI. Even if I did, they weren’t focused on the kind of things I liked, so I had to create something.

We have this saying we have in the book lovers community. It’s something along the lines of, if you don’t see a book on the shelf, that is a sign that you have to write that book. So if there’s something that is needed and is not in existence, it is your responsibility to initialize the concept or create that thing. So I created the book club. The idea was to just read a book for one hour, then we use about 2-3 hours for games or for discussions.

We even went on to do therapy, like post-exam therapy, pre-exam therapy, and we discussed a lot of things. It was like a safe haven for us, and that was the community I was looking forward to. Then we started spicing things up with movies, participating in Halloween activities and all of that stuff. It was a nerd’s haven, let me put it that way.

I can definitely see that.

Yeah, and we produced a lot of A students, my book club. We were not reading technical or academic books, but we produced A students. There was somebody that I met who was on the brink of committing suicide. That was the only reason she didn’t go through with it was that she found a family with us, and that was what saved her.

I just love it.

That’s really amazing. Given the story that you mentioned at the end, it has shown the importance of having a community and people around you who just make you feel like there’s a space where you feel like you belong. Thank you so much for starting Book Panda and for everything that you do.

Yeah, it’s my pleasure.

I have a follow-up question to that. Can you share a book or two that you’ve read so far and that you really enjoyed? It could be fiction, non-fiction, but it’s really had an impact on you.

Yeah, I have four of them and only one of them is a fictional work, but I would say it is even more important than the other three. The very first one is The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Not a lot of people like that book, but it’s my favorite book in the world. If such a thing should exist. I even make it compulsory for anybody joining Book Panda to read that book and take a test on it before joining.

That is how important that is to me. It’s about finding your personal legend. I have a friend also in my department, a very close friend. When we started school, he didn’t know what he wanted to do. He was just going to school for the sake of going. He was very bright, very brilliant. So anything his parents told him to do or study was what he did. Reading the book helped him to find a little bit of happiness in life. He saw more reason to live, started taking more interest into mechatronics and then he went on to specialize way before I did. That was how important The Alchemist was to me. I read it once a year.

The next book I have, which I also read every year, is The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. Naval is someone that everybody should know. He’s an angel investor, an economist. I think if you remove his sayings from Twitter, then there might be a small fraction, maybe 10-20% of people who will find Twitter, Spotify, YouTube, and the like, useless. So I think the Almanack of Naval Ravikant is also worth reading. Those are my two favourite books that I read every year from January.

So, of the other two, one of them is Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. That was where I learned a secret strategy, that success is the result of accumulated advantage. The student who everybody likes in class is who they’ll call on for competitions. The student they call on for competitions is the student who will get awards and look enticing to international universities that want to give them admission. So success is the result of accumulated advantage.

Let’s say you like basketball, and you have good genes and you’re tall, that’s success already for you. You start basketball and you eat a lot of eggs because your parents can afford it, that’s success. Then you start playing basketball because you are tall, and things are coming easier for you. The hoop is not so difficult to shoot at. Everything is a bit easier for you. That’s success. When external coaches come and they see you playing really well, they’ll be like, Wow, this person has a nice height. A Lebron James kind of height. That’s success.

You become good, and you actually put in the hard work, but success is already speaking, even before you put in that hard work. At the end of the day, your parents might send you out to Abuja to play on the international basketball team. And then from there, like my friend Emmanuel back in IJMB, that was how it happened for him. Then he moved to USC, and now he’s playing in the league. He got a scholarship to study there also. So success is the result of accumulated advantage.

There are times I know that things might not go my way. So before I start, for example, in terms of job applications, I start first by contributing to that company, building a reputation there, getting to know people there, and basically accumulating some kind of advantage. That way, I already have an edge. When I apply, I have higher chances of getting it than somebody who just saw the application on LinkedIn and submitted their CV. So I’ve been applying that principle, and I’ve never forgotten that quote. I learned how to remember important quotes from The Alchemist, and it has been helping me in both other books and in life.

The final book is The Way of the Intelligent Rebel. This one I won’t talk about. Its secrets are basically about how school connects to success in the real world. I would just end it here.

Thank you so much. I actually started reading The Way of the Intelligent Rebel, but I lost my books, so I even forgot that I was reading it at that point. I’m going to go back to it now that you’ve brought it up. I think it was even from you that I got the recommendation.

Same thing with the Alchemist. I wanted to join Book Panda late last year, and I actually read The Alchemist. That was during exam period, and I didn’t think you were taking people anymore, and you were about to leave. I didn’t know how book Panda was going to be like going forward, so I didn’t apply anymore. I think we can just speak about that later, but thank you.

I will make sure to read them, and hopefully, our readers will read them and gain a lot from them. So I’m going back to our questions. The next question I have is, you’ve worked your way up to a senior role in six years. What were some moments or decisions that helped you grow so quickly in your career?

One of them was having a mentor. Experience, I think, is the currency of life. It’s something that you can’t get sitting on your own, trying to become better. The fastest way to gain knowledge or experience is by piggybacking on somebody else’s and asking questions. I had somebody who was interested in me, and he guided me. He answered a lot of my questions. We weighed options together and all of that. That was one rung in my ladder of like growth in this space.

Another thing that helped me was discipline. It was as little as studying for at least one hour per day. Pushing code per day. I was trying to start a new community in my final year, LXE, League of Extraordinary Engineers. I didn’t start it up, though. It was meant to be a new safe haven for me as I was handing over Book Panda after finishing school. It was also a play on words. The other idea behind LXE was to LXE, which meant ‘Learn X Everyday’.

Wow!

I still haven’t done much in that community, but I should be bringing it out soon for interested people. It’s going to be very difficult to get in. I promise everybody that.

Speaking of the decisions I made. Most of my decisions were backed by data, in the sense that I am always watching the spaces that exist on Twitter. I’m always looking at what is trending on Twitter. I filtered my Twitter such that I don’t get Nigerian content. If I want to interact with any Nigerian posts, I use a dummy account, but my main account is optimized for my industry and people who have something to offer me. So I surrounded myself with people like that. At the expense of actually growing my career, I decided that I am a young engineer that wants to be interacting with content from people at the level I want to get to.

Another decision I made early on in school was to focus on my career. While that might seem counterintuitive, I think that helped me. Not to brag, but I can say that I am one of the successful graduates from my set. I’ll just put it that way.

Right from the onset, I had three goals in mind. One of them was to graduate with a very good result and then apply for a scholarship. I think that’s one of the best things a person can do. I had a friend with the same goal, and I remember when we dared each other to go for a PhD after BSc. We did our research, and we found a way we could get it done. Just write papers. That friend was studying a four year course, and so he finished before me. Now he has gone on to pursue his PhD.

He was in the data science space, and most papers in the field are code and theory-heavy. But for somebody in robotics or mechatronics looking to further in that space, you have to work with hardware and not just cheap hardware like Arduino, you know, because you’re trying to get a PhD. I didn’t think of that when we made the bet. I didn’t consider that my own path would be rigged and more expensive, but I just blindly agreed to do the competition with him, and I’m so happy he won. He won. And then here I am. I would say I just chose to settle down early in my career.

I lost the bet, and I also lost the ability to apply for scholarships because my result is not something that any school would be willing to give a scholarship for. My Plan B was actually funding my own education, which is what I’ll be resorting to. I’ll be starting after resting for a year plus. I am also quite far into my career, so I decided to get a relocation job to a promising country where the education system is really tangible. And then from there I can pay my tuition for a master’s because there’s no point in my rushing to a PhD anymore because of my BSc. That’s the plan I have lined up. Basically, I’ve wrapped up university. It is it’s done for now, but I still have plans of going to study robotics, abstract mathematics, and like 2 master’s at least, before going for a PhD.

That’s really amazing, and thank you so much for being very open with that and for sharing your plans as well. I’m also well considering you graduate school in robotics, and what you said about your path being rigged and getting access to the tools that you need, and everything is not as easy, I definitely resonate with that. I think it’s one of the things I’m also trying to find a walk around with. So yeah, that’s definitely something that I understand as well.

Macbobby’s story shows that you don’t need to have everything figured out from the start. Sometimes, being curious, taking small steps, and just keeping at it is enough. Even when school and life didn’t go as planned, he kept learning, building, and finding ways to grow.

He reminds us that real learning often happens outside the classroom. By creating habits, joining communities, and taking on challenges early, Macbobby gained skills that textbooks alone couldn’t teach. His journey shows that determination, curiosity, and the people you surround yourself with can make a big difference.

This is the first part of our interview with Macbobby. The next part, where he talks more about his career, lessons from building communities, and plans for further studies, will be out soon.

From all of us at AMTES, we celebrate you!

You can connect with him on LinkedIn.