Engineering confidence: building it as you grow
Event in collaboration with Hack4Her, special guest Busra Koken
Description
Confidence is often seen as having all the answers or speaking without hesitation.
But in tech, where things are always changing and there’s always more to learn, it’s really about trusting your ability to figure things out and keep moving forward — even when you don’t know everything yet.
In this interactive session, we’ll demystify what confidence really is and explore how it shows up in everyday moments from tech life — group projects, internships, hackathons, and new roles. Together, we’ll look at what helps it grow (and what makes it harder) and discover simple ways to support yourself and others.
This workshop is especially for Computer Science and Engineering students or early-career professionals, particularly women and underrepresented groups, who want to build confidence in collaborative and technical spaces without faking it or losing authenticity.
You’ll leave with more clarity, a shared language for what confidence really is, and simple tools to help it show up more naturally in your studies, projects, or early career.
What You’ll Learn (and Apply)
Reframe confidence as a learnable skill — the ability to figure things out, not the pressure to need to know everything.
Understand and identify what shapes your confidence — your inner resources (like courage, preparation, and self-trust) and the external conditions (like safety, clarity, and support) around you.
Explore one real situation from your studies or work and discover what would help confidence show up more naturally.
Leave with clarity, energy, and small, doable actions to keep growing confidence in your studies or early career.
Speaker Bio
Busra Koken is a coach, consultant, and artist with a background in Site Reliability Engineering and Engineering Management. She spent over a decade in the tech industry at companies including Datadog, Trivago, and Picnic, where she built systems, led teams, and supported hundreds of engineers in on-call practices, incident management, and psychological safety.
Today, through her own business Humans in Systems, Busra helps engineers and organizations build sustainable, human-centered ways of working where high performance and wellbeing can coexist. Her approach blends technical depth with empathy, creativity, and systems thinking, creating spaces that are both reflective and practical.