Bachelor's Degree: Manisa Celal Bayar University

Celal Bayar University is located in Aegean Region of Turkey in a city called Manisa. In Turkey, university selection process is a bit different from it is in Europe or United States. After high school there is a public exam, everyone takes at same time. Depending on your grades in each section, you can select school and department of your interest.

I knew I wanted to become a civil engineer since I was 9 if I remember right. In Turkey there are top 3 engineering schools and if you don’t get into one of those it doesn’t make much difference of where you end up. I chose Celal Bayar University because it was located near my hometown and I wanted live with my family while I was in Bachelors.

As it is same almost all over the world, studying engineering is very prestigious here. It is hard to get into an engineering program and it is hard to graduate from an engineering program as well. I knew all of this from beginning and I only stayed up 1 night in an entire 3.5 years. And the only class I had to study over night was “Matlab” a coding class and that was the only class I ever failed in my bachelors degree. My lesson learned from this was “if you don’t know it by last night, you won’t know until tomorrow morning” a sentence my Math teacher always said in high school (yes, she was my idol). Since that day I never stayed up late to study. I liked civil engineering school most when we started taking really technical courses. Even though it was the toughest year (junior year, third year) I had the highest grades on that semester.

Even though I had great education and time in Celal Bayar University, it is not one of the best schools in Turkey. This of course effected when we needed funding for some extracurricular activities (such as steel bridge competition). Another disappointment I had was, I was the only student to ever receive a Fulbright Fellowship and neither the Dean nor the Rector wanted to spread the word. I looked at it as a way to motivate and encourage other students. I believed it was a great way to advertise our school as well. 

Even though I had good and bad times there, I'd like to make one point very clear and that is I learned a lot about my field there. When I went to Poland for Erasmus, even though I was one of the few ones on bachelors, I knew a lot more than most of the students.

Now, with a master's degree from Texas A&M University, I am even thinking about going back to Celal Bayar University for a part-time PhD. I've been always in touch with professors there and they are also very excited to have me back. The point here is no matter how high or low ranking of a school is there are so many factors to success.