This is Ege Baran Dalmaz, a graduate of the department of Foreign Language Education, class of 2018, at METU, who’d like to tell you about his journey (so far) in Istanbul at the Linguistics MA Program of Boğaziçi University. The tone I use within the scope of this text might be deemed dark at times, but that’s how life is, with its ups and downs. Tough love, eh?
It’s safe to say that when I was making the list of universities I’d like to attend to, I just did not want to waste the “points” that I got from ÖSYM (“aman puanın boşa gitmesin yavrum” mindset). I learnt to love my department over time with help of the great professors we’d had, and the fulfillment studying Language and Grammar brought me. You could say that it was an arranged marriage that I grew to love with time.
When I started working on Linguistics with the introductory courses my former department provided (Linguistics I & II), I realized that it was a whole new world waiting to be discovered by people like me. Thinking of Language as a puzzle and finding the rules and regulations that governed it, and testing these concepts brought me great joy that nothing else could. Moreover, helping other people both in practice (as a teacher), and in theory (as an academic) to delve deeper into this world made me happier than I could ever be! I never thought of myself less of a teacher than a student of Linguistics, I enjoyed every bit of different schools of thought (that is; ELT, Linguistics, and Literature) I was given the opportunity to experience during my BA years.
When I learnt that one of the professors, whom I adored from the introductory courses, was teaching a course with a “more advanced” approach in the field of Syntax with elective courses, I jumped at the opportunity. Every second of the two courses, “Introduction to Syntax” and “Advanced Syntax” was like a secret club where people who lived for Language went and exchanged opinions with a great mentor by our side. I’m most grateful for this chance I had to ascend into the world I currently reside in, Linguistics.
At the start of my Senior year at METU, I had the graduation jitters. I wasn’t sure whether to apply for a graduate study in the field of Linguistics for economic concerns. I had to make a choice, whether to continue on the field which I loved, Linguistics; or to go on with my life as an English Teacher in a private school. Former of these possible options made me happier than anything else while the latter gave me safety. I never did not love being a teacher, I still am working as a teacher, and very much enjoying it, at a private university in Istanbul. However, my love for Linguistics was stronger. So, as you can guess, I chose to take the risky path of relocating to a MUCH more expensive and chaotic city and work with what I loved. Although Istanbul is where I grew up as a child, I felt much safer in Ankara in terms of life standards. I would be on my own in Istanbul, while I had my connections, both professionally and personally in Ankara. Despite being on my own in Istanbul, I would set on a personal pilgrimage, I’ve always loved this city more than anywhere else in the world. I took pleasure in the history and architecture of this city since my childhood and wanted to be here once more, with feeling. It was a personal challenge that I set. The challenge that if I could fare well in Istanbul, I could fare better anywhere in the world.
So I applied to Boğaziçi University. When I went for the entrance exams, I felt that I could make this place my home just as much as I had made METU. The professors, the students: the mindset of the school was on par with mine just as it was for METU. There were two criteria I had to pass in order to get in: a written exam and an interview based on the Statement of Purpose I had sent earlier with the rest of the documents for application. Those who passed the written exam had the chance to sit in an interview. Come the day of the written exam, it was just as I’d imagined it would be: a test consisting of the introductory Linguistics courses with an essay question to prove that you’re special. Anyone who’s interested in Linguistics and had taken the Linguistics I & II courses offered at my former department could pass this exam with ease. However; the interview was… It was really intense for me, I had no idea to whether I would get in or not because of the intensity of the questions they had asked me. Within 15 minutes, there hasn’t even been a single 5 second breathing room for me to relax, it was all questions and nothing else which I had to answer very carefully and thoroughly. They asked me questions ranging from whether there were differences between the definition of vowel harmony in my pre-university years and BA years, to questions that asked me to compare the regional dialect of Turkish from my mother’s side (the dialect spoken in the coastal Aegean Region) and Standard Turkish. A week later, during the annual spring festival of METU, I had received the good news: I was in! They declared that I had to take a “bilimsel hazırlık” year, which they called the negatively-connotated “remedial year” (the term remedial is also used for english prep-school students who failed to pass the proficiency test at the first year of their studies and are forced to retake the exam). This remedial year consisted of several classes from the Bachelor’s program they offered, to catch me up on the possibly lacking knowledge in several other subfields of Linguistics. I was intensely happy for the first few days after the announcement of my getting in, but it wasn’t until I realized now it meant I had to get a new place to live, a new job to make ends meet, a completely new life.
It was horrifying to think of making a living in a city of 15-20 million inhabitants with the highest cost of living in the country, on my own. I worked in multiple part-time jobs here, giving private lessons, working at a private course, and finally at a private university, which I’m currently working in. I was deemed suitable to receive TÜBİTAK Scholarship for Master’s education, and am currently waiting for the scholarship to start. It was a difficult couple of months since my relocation. And to think of it, if I started with the Master’s level courses immediately as I moved here, it would have been extremely difficult. So my advice to those who’d like to study at Boğaziçi University Linguistics program would be to have some savings at the side, as much as possible to make the first few months easier. Especially if you’re getting little to no support from your family. The courses at the remedial year are all spread into the week, unlike at METU. The courses are not clumped up into 3-hour block lessons, they are spread throughout the week, which makes finding a full time job especially hard, but it is not completely unmanageable. Many institutions refuse to work with you at start, but there’s always a chance to work in “evening courses” of private universities which are after 17:00 and/or over the weekends.
For accommodation, it was another chaotic issue at start. The university has sent off the dormitory of graduate students into a remote district at north of Üsküdar called Kandilli where access to the city is not so easy. The school provided the students with shuttle services (which made it much easier) for the first month and a half I lived there. It never had enough capacity and the school was so unprofessional at the time in terms of scheduling. The dorm itself, in terms of logistics, was basically a heaven for someone who loved nature and quiet. Single rooms are provided to the students within 3- 4- or 5-people suites. The rent is around 600₺ per month with a 400₺ non-refundable entrance fee paid at the very beginning. As I had to work at the same time and I loved exploring the city, the inconveniences far outweighed the advantages of living in Kandilli, so I moved out into Hisarüstü, which is to BOUN what 100. Yıl is for METU. The rents here are ranging from 600 to 1000TRY per room, the houses are in bad-to-moderate conditions, so it’s a bit of a gamble between easy access to school and having better house conditions to choose where you live in Istanbul. Other options where students live include districts like Gültepe and Ortabayır near Levent, and Kurtuluş near Osmanbey where it gets more expensive.
The professors and other Linguistics students, both MA and BA, of BOUN made me feel right at home in terms of intellectual and academic fulfillment. There are a range of options to choose as an academic path and possible research interests such as sign languages and their structure, formal semantics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, processing, biolinguistics, generative syntax, phonology, morphology, acquisition and probably many more fields I couldn’t recall. I would definitely recommend you to study here if you’re determined to stay in Turkey for the time being. Keep it in mind that the path to having a pleasant life here is very rugged and rough. It’s still worth it to have the challenge grow you as a person both personally and professionally.
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