I was born in 1996 in Manisa, Turkey. Before starting primary school I had already learnt both reading and writing thanks to my elder sister’s books and her effort. When I started the primary school, I was considered to promote to 2.class without taking education from first level, yet I didn’t accept it so that I could see all the educational phase.
After starting high school named “Hasan Turek Anatolian High School”, I continued to learn guitar through internet by myself, which I had already taken couple of basic lessons from municipality course center. Then, I learnt classical guitar followed by bass guitar from internet. In this way, I was bassist in the school band and took part in different events related to school and municipality as well as 2 competitions named “Vodafone Freezone High School Music Competition” in 2014 and 2015 respectively. I didn’t study much until the last year of the high school. Nevertheless, I took honour certificate in the last year thanks to my hard work. Additionally, I took better result than most of my friends did from the university entrance exam in 2015 (I was nearly 70 000 out of 1,944,933 candidates, which corresponds 3.56% of total.).
Then I moved to Bursa where I studied in the department of mechanical engineering at “Bursa Uludag University”. After taking 1-year-mandatory-English-preparation class, I started to study in my own department. I couldn’t pass 2 of my lectures in the first final exam of the first semester (one was related to history, another was “Calculus-I”), due to the fact that I don’t like history and I was late for calculus. However, I passed both after taking second chance for final exams. Even so, I passed “Basic Physics-I”, a lecture in which more than %90 of the students who took it in the same year as me couldn’t pass even after taking the second chance of the final exams. In the second term of the first year, I passed all of my lectures by being in the first 10% of my department. Hence, “honor certificate” was given to me. In the meantime, I helped some of my friends by teaching them “C++”, the subject which helped me to understand that I like coding, and “MATLAB”, and “Calculus” and “Physics”.
The first term of the second year followed the same by being in the first 10%, yet we were only 5 in the list because of being hard and I got my second “honor certificate”. Meanwhile, I found some friends whom I could make music with. Then we started to perform cover of many songs in not only events of couple of events relevant to university but also private places. Afterwards, I got “higher honor certificate” in the second term, since my GPA of the term was 3.75. I had already planned to study at a university which has better conditions by the middle of the year, so I applied for a programme called “Farabi Student Exchange Programme”, which includes the universities situated in my own country and candidates were chosen among the students from all of the universities in Turkey.
I was accepted to the programme and I studied at “Yıldız Technical University” located in Istanbul for a year. During my education period in Istanbul, I was aware of that everything depended on a student and it wasn’t related to which university I was studying. I was successful in that university, too and passed all of the exams at the first trying, in spite of many students who took some of the exams twice. Besides the lectures, I attended a seminar called “BEMDAYS”, which was arranged by a student club called “MAKTEK” in March-2019, which covered various topics from different speakers who worked in different industries from NASA to Toyota. One of the speaker was “Onat ATAYER”, who graduated from the same university as I continued the exchange programme and who was working in “Microsoft”, and his presentation was related to “Data Science” and how the works will be shaped in the future. I was impressed after learning unordinary knowledges concerned with data and data era.
By the time when I completed my education in Istanbul, I had already applied for my second exchange programme called “Erasmus Student Exchange Programme” and I was the second student among the other ones in my department who applied for the same programme in the same term, so my first choice was accepted.
In my third year, I moved to Poland in order to study at “Silesian University of Technology” located in Gliwice, Poland. My main aim in the programme was to learn the cultures in different countries and seeing the differences by observing, so I travelled 15 different countries located in around Poland. That’s why I couldn’t pass 3 of my lectures in that time. Probably I would do the same thing, if I had chance to go back those times.
Just before completing my education in Poland, Coronavirus had already broken out and spread out many countries, but I was able to come back to my country without any restriction. In fact, I went to Bursa to continue the education in my home university, but a declaration that universities would give a break for education was announced by ministry. I had to come back to my hometown, Manisa.
I learnt Arduino and implemented many projects (such as Bluetooth controlled home-made electrical vehicle, and the controlling of servo motor through RF-module, and more) during pandemic, besides my university lectures. My education continued as remote. At the meantime, I took some courses related to “SolidWorks”, and “Advanced Excel” from “Elginkan Foundation”. Also, I bought a “3D printer”. I worked on that by fixing the printing problems and creating designs through “SolidWorks”. Next year, I did my final project in which the subject was specified by me related to “Designing of Quadcopter and Controlling by Arduino-MATLAB”. I worked on my final project for a semester. During the project, data which came from sensor was the hardest part due to being noisy. In spite of adding “kalman filter” and some materials which absorbed the vibration, it was still problem up to a point. In fact, it was more problematic than PID, even though it looked something simple, so I got the importance of managing data as I desired.
I couldn’t graduate from the university after finishing all of the lectures that I had to take. Because I didn’t complete my mandatory internship entirely. Then I was accepted as a part time manufacturing engineer by a company where metal parts were produced after the processes of either laser or punch cutting followed by bending machines. It was 6-month period for the first part and it was extended. While I was working in there, I took part in different units of the factory and I mainly thought about improvements that could be performed in order to eliminate the situation which created loss of efficiency by observing operators for weeks. Moreover, there was a system which took data from workers’ operations, interacting with “Power BI”. From time to time, I transferred relevant data in order to use in “Excel” and match with my observation notes and make up better decisions by creating different charts (bar, line, pie) based on operator, machine, shift. After these point, I comprehended the importance of the data completely and humanity is at the just beginning of it relatively. I took some basic-level courses related to “Data Science and Introduction to AI” and “Data Literacy” from the educational platform of “Turkcell” called “Geleceği Yazanlar”.
Then I decided to learn the aforementioned subject thoroughly at all costs, but there were a few people who know this field in my country, so I had to learn it abroad and the first thing that I needed to do was taking IELTS. I quit the job so that I could find more time to study for the exam. In this way, I would be able to study at the universities from all over the world. Occasionally, I took short-period courses from “Global AI Hub”, which helped me to meet with “Kaggle”, for “data visualization”, “data analysis” as well as that of long-period ones such as “Python”, and “SQL” from “Elginkan Foundation” and I searched frequently about data science from different sources in order to draw a path to learn. I kept on taking information from internet. Finally, I took 6.5 from IELTS on October and then, I thought that it would be better studying for “statistics”. I found the lecture notes of “Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)” and started to study for them. Also, I watched almost all of the videos about statistical methods used in machine learning algorithms, created by Sadi Evren ŞEKER (an eminent professor in this field mainly). In the meantime, I started to learn from Kaggle and. Still, I am making progress day by day.
I started to study at the university of Sussex on September,2023. I have learnt new information, while I have found many opportunities to review my knowledge in different sub-subjects of data science such as statistics, and programming. Furthermore, we have been dealing with statistics, NLP, some libraries in python, hypothesis testing by projects, and quizzes. I started to feel like a data scientist thanks to these.
Up to now, I think I am someone who can learn anything that I am interested in by myself, but I need to be boosted in this field for being ready in a shorter time, so I need professional help and need to figure out the fundamental of this subject completely. I am looking forward the days when I am ready for implementing new projects created by myself and convey my knowledge for the next generation. I am cut out for this field, since I really like to reveal something new that many people can’t do on computer by using various tools. Data collected from a large group of sources are getting increase and some people are needed to handle with it in the science of the data.