CampusWIN Academy Day on Grit @ Solvoyo

Our passion and perseverance will carry us forward

This month we learned about grit, a character quality that we aspire to build as part of our 21st- century skills. We are following the World Economic Forum guideline outlined below in our CampusWIN Academy gatherings.

What is grit? Can we increase our grit? With these questions in our head, we were hosted by our corporate member Solvoyo’s Istanbul offices at the ITU Teknokent. Solvoyo is on her way to become a unicorn tech start up. We thought their grit story matched up really well with our theme! The day’s program was a follows:

10.00-10.30 Check in & Networking
10.30-11.00 TurkishWIN & BinYaprak Team Updates 
11.00-12:00 What is Grid? by Mine Ongün,Psychologist
12:00- 13:30 Lunch 
13.30 15:00 CampusWIN Committee Presentations 
15:00-16:00 Masters Circle: Nilufer Durak, COO, Solvoyo & Seval Öz, Future of Mobility Whiz
16:00-16:30 Company Visit 
16:30-17:00 Reflections 

We had some recommended readings to prepare us for the day ahead:

• Angela Duckworth’s TED Talk on Grit
• A grit story from CampusWIN: Inci Kadribegic
• Meet the speakers: Nilufer Durak & Seval Öz

The first order of business was a celebration: we celebrated the amazing TurkishWIN Career Day we all worked so hard to put together: CampusWIN, TurkishWIN and BinYaprak teams were one! We had over 1000 attendees and an amazing day of sisterhood celebration. A huge thanks goes to the captains of the event: Dilara Akbulut, Ceren Dişbudak & Sena Kahraman. You were rock stars!

After TurkishWIN and BinYaprak teams gave us updates on what’s around the corner, psychologist Mine Baş Görgün guided us through Angela Duckworth’s book on “Grit” and helped us discover our grit. We were on stage and showed our true colors. We rated ourselves on our passion, perseverance and resilience. Here is the big ideas on “grit”:

1. Grit is about holding the same top-level goal for a very long time.
2. People with grit have four psychological assets: (1) interest (2) practice (3) purpose (4) hope.
3. Gritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow.
4. Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it. It’s not about falling in love; it’s about staying in love.
5. Grit has two components: passion and perseverance. Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.

After the lunch break, CampusWIN Committee Presentations started. We were able to catch up with each others committees and what they were up to after the TurkishWIN Career Day. During the presentations we talked about our committees’ goals, volunteers and for some committees future leads were introduced as some of the leads will be graduating in a while.

In our Masters panel, we had two gritty women: Seval Öz and Nilüfer Durak, COO of Solvoyo. They both shared how they motivate themselves and charge up their grit.

Seval has been working on the future of mobility for a long time- first as the Senior Director of global business development and partnerships for GoogleX’s self-driving vehicle’s commercial launch. Now, she is pushing the envelope as CEO of a recently funded stealth start-up in Silicon Valley (Aurima.ai) concentrating on camera/radar image fusion for sensory perception in autonomous vehicles. This startup is funded partially by Google Alphabet’s newly announced AI-focused fund, Gradient Ventures, in Mountain View. She shared with us stories of grit- how she kept on building a new market when autonomous cars were just a dream.

Nilufer Durak, COO of Solvoyo, our host shared with us the grit story of her company. The founding team built the product for years to bring a revolutionary yet approachable technology offering intelligent solutions to the toughest supply chain planning challenges. It’s a “simply smart” math-based solution that brings enterprise-level performance to businesses of all sizes. Their purpose is for all companies- small and large leverage their own data for mission critical decisions. Solvoyo is now a next generation solution along with incumbent large players like Microsoft and SAP. It takes grit to invest in one’s vision and to become a player despite unfavorable odds. We were super inspired by Solvoyo’s story.

We felt at home since our fellow CampusWIN alum, Buse Baştürk works at Solvoyo and welcomed us warmly througout the day. She shared her own story with us. We were also welcomed by Solvoyo team leaders who took the time to share with us their stories and took us to the office tour. We had a busy Q&A is an understatement!

This was a day of learning, catching up with our fellow CampusWIN sisters and inspiration from amazing leaders.

Thank you Solvoyo for hosting our CampusWIN Academy Day. We now know all about grit!