Reforms are required to improve graduate science education in Turkey (and everywhere)

Emre Türköz
Jul 23, 2017 · 8 min read

After arriving in Princeton on a hot September day in 2014, I found myself attending the orientation for the incoming international graduate students. My new life was about to start in the end of this three-day orientation and with the new knowledge I have about the US (mostly about the dangers of diet soda and fried food along with the complicated directions on how we can use our health insurance). I still remember it like it was yesterday when I had my first Saturday brunch with my friends whom I met during the orientation. Later to be my closest friends, Leon (a politics student from South Africa) and Alisya (another engineering student from Turkey) were with me for brunch at the Whitman college, which is one of the residential colleges in Princeton. With the all-you-can-eat buffet and omelet station, our first brunch experience in Whitman was phenomenal. That event would be later marked as the “Whitman Brunch” by us, and always be remembered as the moment when we realized how lucky and privileged we are to be in Princeton.

The residential Whitman College dining hall in Princeton

I’m a Ph.D. candidate in engineering at Princeton University. After spending 3 years in this institution and enjoying all the privileges coming with it, I can not help to think about what needs to change back home so that graduate students there could enjoy the same opportunities. Since I’m holding an MSc. degree from a Turkish university, I believe I can compare two different graduate school experiences with each other and offer some solutions to improve the level of graduate education back in Turkey. Here, I’d like to note that Princeton example does not probably represent all the institutions in the U.S or other parts of the world, therefore, similar conclusions presented below can be applied to institutions everywhere.

The success of a research performed by a graduate student depends on a complicated mix of factors. It is very important that Ph.D. advisers and their graduate students can maintain a good mentor-mentee relationship. The success of the student is closely related to the success of their advisers and the quality of the directions coming from them. The availability of funding and access to the required hardware and software resources determine the quality of the research outcome directly.

I think there is another very important point that determines the success of a graduate program: Keeping the graduate students who perform the research happy, engaged and motivated. The most crucial element in the lab to conduct the experiments is never a device or instrument, but graduate students themselves who are working in the lab on that project. Living and breathing their projects, graduate students can turn into the most knowledgeable experts in a particular field in a short time. Here, I should emphasize that the success of the collective scientific effort depends on the success of individual graduate students working on their own projects.

All parties involved in scientific research know by now that doing science is expensive. Maybe because of this reason, money is always tight in science. However, limited resources can be spent as wisely as possible through good planning. Graduate students spend a lot of time in the lab and have their breakthroughs if they do not have to work at a second job to make the end’s meet. This does not necessarily mean to pay the graduate students so much that they can save enough to pay for the down-payment of their dream house, however, an institution should make sure that most of its graduate students get a sufficient amount of funding to provide for their basic needs.

It is important to note the difference between the funding schemes in American and Turkish universities (at least for engineering programs). American universities send the funding scheme along with the acceptance letter, while Turkish universities do not offer funding before a graduate student starts the program. After I decided to pursue my Master’s degree in Turkey, I had to wait for a month before any opening for teaching assistantship was posted. Afterwards, I had to prepare a job application, take a written exam and then wait for the result to find out if I got in. I was among the two out of 35 applicants who were lucky enough to get a teaching job. My first salary was deposited in the beginning of January which is four months after I started graduate school. This level of uncertainty definitely creates tension among Turkish students, and this tension mostly gets carried over to a fierce competition to get one of the few teaching assistant positions listed by the institution.

There is also an alternative route of funding through TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) if students sustain a high GPA during their undergraduate education and have a good score at the ALES (GRE-like assessment test for graduate-level programs). But similar to teaching assistantship jobs, students can apply to this fellowship only after they start their programs, not before, and again the first salary gets deposited around January. Another issue with this fellowship opportunity is the fact that it relies on the undergraduate GPA and a centralized exam result, and does not include a formal application with the list of publications and letters of recommendations.

Some professors also have projects funded by TUBITAK, which allows them to fund a few students per project. However the salary coming from these projects is mediocre and with no benefits compared to a teaching job, and again, it can not be officially offered before the graduate student starts the program.

Due to this uncertainty coming with the funding, best students in engineering and science tend to work in the industry or apply for a university abroad where they can be promised funding beforehand. If students could apply and find out if they will be funded throughout their graduate education before they started, they could plan their finances accordingly and would not have to deal with finding money after they started graduate school, where the first year of graduate programs is already very challenging because students take advanced classes for the first time. Streamlining the funding process would take a lot of pressure off of students, and it would not require to increase the amount of resources available for graduate students, instead it would only require a better planning of funding sources.

Most of the first-year graduate students live at the Graduate College in Princeton, which leads to the formation of a sense of community.

The sense of community is another important part of the collective scientific effort. During one of our group meetings my advisor told us that “knowledge is the only thing that does not decrease with sharing.” It is indeed very important for graduate students to have a community, so that they can find both emotional and professional support from each other. My department tries to implement this community through department breakfasts, daily coffee breaks, Friday seminars followed by a social hour, lunch talks, barbecues, and many similar events where the faculty can also participate. The university itself funds various parties and other gatherings to bring all the graduate students from different departments together. Because Princeton guarantees on-campus housing for at least three years, graduate students live together for most of their programs at the same place which improves their relations and friendship. This sense of community paves the way for further collaboration between students and the faculty so that most students work on additional projects with professors other than their advisors.

It’s been surprising to me that this sense of community can be so beneficial for everybody who participates in it. For first two years, graduate students in my department do their homeworks and study for their qualifying exams together, and later this turns into helping each other out by letting another graduate student use equipment that they do not have in their labs. A similar sense of community was not available during my Master’s degree education in Turkey. It is understandable that building this community requires additional resources (providing free food and drinks for graduate students and planning events), however, I think it plays a very crucial role in determining whether the student will be successful. This sense of community eventually leads to the sharing of limited resources and more efficient use of valuable equipment in multiple projects. The gatherings also bring the faculty and the graduate students together, so that they can discuss research or just their daily lives in a relaxed setting.

Investing in science is still very important, and funding still plays a very important role. However, science is a shared effort, where the success requires investing in the graduate student community and the success does not solely rely upon dedicating a certain amount of funds, but also on streamlining and getting rid of bureaucratic obstacles during the process of doing science. It is therefore no surprise that from the top 25 countries [1] that send the most students to the US, 16 of them are developing countries according to UNDP [2]. Even if Turkey started to invest more in science [3], the lack of established and streamlined processes still discourage the brightest minds to stay in their homeland.

In Ankara, professors and researchers, who have lost their jobs, are prevented from holding protest rallies by the police (February 10th, 2017).

In addition to the funding and bureaucratic issues, the brain drain from Turkey recently increased tremendously due to the recent political developments and purged academicians from the universities [4]. Justified or not, the ongoing purge causes more people to be reluctant to get into academia [5], which is apparently prone to the changes in the political climate. It can easily be assumed that the recent political climate has disastrous effects on the outcome of the scientific efforts, which rely on well-established and stable communities.

Turkey has three fundamental challenges listed here to thrive in science. It should fix its funding scheme, improve its infrastructure and community for graduate students, and protect its academia from political storms taking place in the country. Among these three, the funding problem looks the easiest to fix by looking at examples of developed countries on how and when to make funding offers to prospective students. Establishing a good community for graduate students should be joint effort among the university and department administrations, and governmental funding agencies should dedicate the required funding by understanding that this is very essential for the success of the research. Academia has historically been at the center of politics in Turkey, therefore, I think a drastic reform is required to separate the effect of the politics from the universities. This drastic reform can include a temporary ban preventing university presidents and deans taking part in government positions except for consulting services that can be allowed for a limited time to minimize the conflict of interest between the university administrations and politicians.

For Turkish universities to thrive in science, serious policy changes are required. I believe the realization of the need of these changes is very essential. The outcome of scientific efforts will not change if the only improvement the Turkish government can come up with is pouring more money. The increased funding should be accompanied by reforms to improve the whole academic environment, so that graduate students in Turkey one day can feel as privileged as their colleagues in the US do while ordering brunch at a residential dining hall.

[1] https://www.iie.org/Research-and-Insights/Open-Doors/Fact-Sheets-and-Infographics/Leading-Places-of-Origin-Fact-Sheets/2016

[2] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2014/01/pdf/text.pdf

[3] https://www.elsevier.com/connect/turkeys-scientific-research-output-is-booming-but-what-about-the-quality

[4] http://www.politico.eu/article/turkey-failed-coup-purge-scholars-loses-its-brains/

[5] https://www.nature.com/news/the-turkish-paradox-can-scientists-thrive-in-a-state-of-emergency-1.21475

Ph.D candidate / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering / International graduate student in the U.S. / Current affairs & science

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