ROUND TABLE

Class Rank

Educational institutes of every style are supporting Turkey’s young population as it becomes the backbone of the growing economy.

YILDIRIM ÜÇTUĞ

IN ONE YEAR

We have almost 700 students, including graduate students, six faculties, 21 departments, almost 140 academic staff, and 70 administrative personnel; so there are almost 1,000 of us. We’ve achieved a lot in a year.

MORE THAN TEACHING

We set research goals for staff, and these are an important element of promotion within the university. Research is what distinguishes universities from schools and other educational institutions, so we think it is very important. To be a university professor, you need to do more than just teach.

INTERNATIONAL FOCUS

We have a few international teachers in our language preparatory school, and we have 15-20 international students from countries such as Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Somalia. Now, we are receiving applications for the current year, and we are placing an emphasis on internationalization.

MUSTAFA AYDIN

EARLY BEGINNINGS

In 1995, I founded a private university with a language school offering Farsi, Arabic, Russian, and Greek language courses, which were not on offer then. The political situation in the country didn’t allow these languages. When I founded these schools, I was taking a risk, but I started a successful trend.

MATCH MAKING

We offer applied education, and no university can emulate what we do. Every student has to work in a company for two days a week. In their first year with a company, students begin to develop business relationships with enterprises, which they often go on to join permanently after graduation.

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES

We’re trying to prepare our students for life in an international sphere. We also try to send our students abroad on Erasmus and summer programs. We send our students to places like the US, India, and South Africa for six, 12, or even 24 months, to give them a global perspective.

İBRAHİM ARIKAN

RESEARCH & FINDINGS

We researched education in the UK, the US, Russia, Finland, Denmark, Japan, Germany, and France. We looked at all the private and public schools from high school to university, as well as religious schools, and analyzed our findings.

ALL IN ENGLISH

In math and science the language of instruction is English and the school is really tough. Students work with their teachers at night, going to laboratories and doing their homework, and we are open on Saturdays and Sundays.

AFTER GRADUATION

It is not compulsory to take the TOEFL exam when students graduate, but approximately 80% of them do take the exam, and we are the number one school in Turkey in that regard. All of our students go on to university. About 20% go abroad and almost all of them are awarded a scholarship.

ERHAN ERKUT

EVERY ANGLE

We have several faculties as well as schools of applied sciences that house vocational programs. On the faculty side we have business, engineering, law, arts, and sciences, and we are also setting up schools of architecture and design.

TOWARD EMPLOYMENT

The entire university is geared toward employability, but in the vocational programs this is even more obvious. Aviation management is one such example. If you look at the growth of the aviation sector across the world, it is growing faster than global GDP.

PRIME LOCATION

We offer a North American style of education at one-half or one-third of the cost. All of our faculty members were educated in North America. We do all of this in a very interesting city. Istanbul is a city of 14 million and it is an economic and commercial hub for the entire region.

İZZET BOZKURT

A YOUNG BASE

As a young university, we have had a chance to observe the experiences of other new universities, and we have put everything in place. Now we are at the stage of building a strong foundation.

MANY FACULTIES

The university has 10 faculties, and five of them are health-oriented. There’s a medical school, a pharmacy school, a dental school, a four-year healthcare program, and also an occupational school. We also have communications, arts and sciences, law, and social sciences faculties as well.

A CHANCE TO COMPETE

If we develop the necessary vision from now on, our students and graduates will have the chance to compete with those from other universities, both national and international. We would like our graduates to go and get jobs in Germany, the UK, the US, or anywhere else in the world.