Koç University News & Announcements Bulletin

July 2020

MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT

The awful COVID-19 pandemic that engulfed our planet forced us to dramatically change our lives and our focus has switched to dealing with changes and challenges brought upon us. Each month since March, my newsletters started with talking about how different that month was, compared to the same time in the previous year.

Even though our challenges still continue, having our usual busy, fast-paced and exciting month of July, with the all-important undergraduate student recruitment and placement period, was refreshing. This year not only the preference and placement period is spread out over a longer time, covering both July and August, but it was also interrupted by the Feast of Sacrifice holidays. In previous years, we would have thousands of visitors, candidate students and families on our wonderful campus, to talk to our faculty members and Deans and to listen to a host of presentations. However, this year, after careful deliberations, we decided to change the modality of these 'open days' to online, as we wanted to focus all our efforts to safely opening our campus in the Fall.

Thus, we are hosting our guests online, every day, all of us either at home, in our offices or in a remote location on campus. We keep the flow of our presentations similar to our usual on campus, face to face interactions from previous years, keeping in mind that what really matters is our 'rendezvous' with our visitors and the opportunity for us to orient these bright students in making healthy and well-founded choices, wherever they eventually decide to go.

The 'Groundhog-day' effect in these meetings remains the same, even more so this year, as I basically talk about the same stuff every day, albeit to completely different audiences. This year, instead of standing every single day in front of a full house of eager families and student candidates at our Sevgi Gönül Cultural Center (SGKM), I am in front of my computer in my office looking at a screen. I have to admit that there is a huge sense of loss with this one-sided rendezvous -- not seeing the faces of student candidates and their parents, their mimics which show their feelings - sometimes approving, sometimes admiring and even proud, sometimes surprised, sometimes disappointed but human all the same.

However, despite all these challenges, being present and accessible to students and parents is the key, and my goal is always the same. I am here to share with them the vision of our university and to talk to them about what makes us different. My goal really is to try to orient them in the direction of making choices along the lines of what the young candidates are really excited and enthusiastic about, rather than being overly guided by the advice and direction of parents, siblings, friends and counselors or by the perceived employment opportunities in one field or another.

As part of my brief introductory remarks, I start with acknowledging the current predicament we are all in. Uncertainty and dealing with uncertainty have for now become the norm, the 'new normal'. Before this pandemic, the future was still uncertain; when people asked me in the past what to choose as a profession, what the trendy professions of the future were, I would respond to them by stating that I did not know and I would add that anyone who claimed to know what the future held would be disillusioned. Thus, my advice would always be for them to follow their passion, expand themselves in different fields, explore and have multiple interests as the future is likely to require people who are adaptable, that are trained in and exposed to multiple disciplines. Now with the current situation with our lives continuing to be impacted by this pandemic, it is impossible to predict the future. Thus, my earlier advice is now even more prescient.

Continuing from this point, I underline the importance of choosing the right university. I spell out in macroscopic detail the tremendous investment of the Vehbi Koç Foundation in our country via our university, both in terms of capital investment in our facilities and the generous financial contribution we receive every year for our operating budget. I talk about the deep sense of responsibility that myself and my colleagues feel in trying to utilize these resources in the most impactful way for our bright students so that we can best serve our country and society at large.

I talk about our emphasis on providing a free environment guided only by the wants and wishes of students and faculty, minimizing central regulation and bureaucratic impediments to the pursuit of excellence. I tell our visitors that our vision of governance is to gather excellent people and then ‘get out of their way’. People produce the best and the most when they are the freest, so all we really have to do is to provide and protect the free environment.

I am proud to be talking about our successes, whether it be in terms of the vigorous global search efforts for outstanding faculty members and the fact that many of the more than twenty positions for which we recruited this year were selected from a pool of 40 to 50 highly capable candidates, or the rising number of double-majors each year or the fact that literally half of the mega-grants (1.5 to 2.5M Euro each) in Turkey from the European Research Council are hosted at Koç University or the exceptional rankings of our undergraduates or the richness of our student clubs.

One particular point I make every day is the tremendous rise that our University has realized in the field of medicine in recent years. Koç University School of Medicine and Koç University Hospital continue to deliver extraordinary value, attracting the brightest and best students and generating many new research opportunities, while delivering exceptional healthcare to our people. I share my utmost belief that many of the developments with the highest social impact in the next 10 to 30 years will undoubtedly take place in the areas of the overlap of medicine, engineering, law, natural, social and administrative sciences. With this in mind, I emphasize that our university is the only institution in Turkey with a School of Medicine, surrounded by other top notch undergraduate and graduate schools, underscoring the importance of studying medicine at a university with other disciplines at the highest level, surely bringing a whole new perspective to university selection criteria.

This year, I also outline our efforts to return to our campus in the Fall, starting off with how our 'Return to Campus Task Force' has been meeting twice a week for two-hour meetings each since the beginning of May and how this past spring, we all went through a digital transformation in just two weeks, having all our 703 classes successfully transition to online.

I give the details of how our face-to-face teaching/learning model with hybrid options is to work as most of the questions revolve around the upcoming Fall Semester. Most importantly, I summarize our new investments, enabling state-of-the-art video broadcast and recording technology in all of our classrooms and learning spaces to further strengthen our infrastructure and capabilities in simultaneous learning modalities and to ensure academic readiness for flexible hybrid teaching and learning.

We still have another two weeks of this undergraduate student recruitment and placement period ahead of us in August and I look forward to our exchanges with the potential student candidates and families.

In July, we also commemorated those who have bravely lost their lives to protect our republic and our democracy during the coup d'état attempt against our government on July 15, 2016 and we offer our heartfelt condolences to their families and loved ones and also express our respects for those brave citizens who were wounded in the course of resisting this uprising. On behalf of our entire university community, we once again strongly condemn this loathsome act against our democracy and the free will of our people.

At Koç University, we are determined to protect and preserve our republic, our democracy, our country and our future by working our hardest to capture excellence in education and in scientific research and to thereby pioneer the elevation of the standards of living of our country and our people.

We rounded up this summer month with the Feast of Sacrifice holidays. One of the most special things about the Feast of Sacrifice is that it makes us live the beauty of sharing with those in need, as well as with our family and loved ones.

While we are still in the midst of an epidemic that continues to impact our lives, let us remember this beautiful tradition and let us not forget that we should never lose our faith in overcoming obstacles, however difficult they might be.

My very best wishes for a healthy month of August...

Umran İnan

/umransavasinan
/profumraninan