Experience report – Istanbul Koç University 2016-2017 Fall semester
E-mail: [email protected]
Study Program: University College Tilburg – Major Social Sciences
Exchange semester: Fall
Academic year: 2016-2017
Host University: Koç University (Koç Üniversitesi)
Country: Turkey
September 15, 2016. I got up early to catch my plane. This was the day I left my comfortable,
well-known life in Tilburg. I was born and raised there, and still went to University there. But
that day, I went to Istanbul. I went to Istanbul, despite political and civil unrest in the area,
despite a failed coup and multiple bomb attacks having taken place there not long before, I
went there despite warnings from friends and family and suggestions to reconsider my
choice. And it turned out to be amazing.
First of all, Istanbul is so much bigger than what I was used to and I was confident
that I did not know all about Turkish customs, values and traditions. Upon arrival, I met with
one of my three housemates-to-be at the airport. The other two had already gone to our
house a bit before (we arranged off-campus housing). We met and took a taxi to our house,
and with maps on our phones and the limited knowledge of English of our driver, we
managed to arrive there. Tip: make sure your taxi driver knows English, if you don’t know
Turkish. It makes communication a bit easier.
Living in a big city like Istanbul is quite interesting, since there are a lot of areas to
visit and Istanbul also hosts historical value, which is appealing. On the downside, mainly due
to Koç’s location far north from the city center, it takes a long time and multiple forms of
public transportation to get somewhere. If you decide to go somewhere later on the day,
you are set up for an hour, maybe an hour and a half of travel time, or you are limited to the
facilities on campus or just around West campus, which entails a bar and a few restaurants.
Koç University has a beautiful campus, and much bigger than our university here. It should
be, on account of many people living there: the university holds 4000-5000 students, and
most of them live on campus. Either Main campus, where a small supermarket, multiple
sports and food facilities are located, and where classes are taught, or on West campus,
where a gym, swimming pool and a few food facilities are present. On Main campus, an
outdoor swimming pool and a soccer field are normally open, but were closed for my
semester. The ice skating rink, outdoor and indoor tennis courts, indoor basketball and
volleyball field and gym were open. There are lots of student clubs, which contribute to an
awesome semester: many joined the scuba diving club, rugby club or formed a group of
people who like to play football themselves and met up whenever it suited them, relatively
close to campus. I participated in a scuba diving trip and in krav maga myself, and really
enjoyed both.
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The security on campus is strict. A student card must be presented upon every entry
to campus, both West and Main. Visitors are allowed until 11 pm. They can obtain a visitor’s
card in exchange for an identity card and switch the two upon leaving the campus. Since the
beginning of 2017, the trunks of all incoming cars are also checked as additional security
measures. Alcohol is not allowed on campus and nobody can stay over (although both of
these rules were broken by some, without consequences if unnoticed). Incoming exchange
students shared a room on West campus with two Turkish students, and many had issues
with their roommates. I am glad to have lived off-campus, although I lived very close.
Transport to Main campus goes through shuttles, which run regularly between the two
campuses for free, or by minibuses (dolmuş), which cost 1.80 TL one-way, or taxi, which
costs around 10 TL.
I enjoyed campus life, since you always run into people you know. Almost every day I
met with people for lunch and dinner on campus, and was able to play basketball, table
tennis, go ice skating or studying in between. Classrooms in Koç were not really liked by
most, due to the lack of windows and lack of fresh air as a result. Some people literally had
no classes in rooms with windows, and I only had one course in such a room. The library was
often very hot and the air did not feel so good either.
Facility-wise, the campus was great, especially the sports facilities. What I failed to
understand was that a university that costs 55.000 TL a year for local students, owns an ice
skating rink, an indoor pool, a gym on both campuses, a normally functional outdoor
swimming pool and soccer field etcetera lacked good Wi-Fi. Especially at first, people were
sometimes unable to connect and those who were connected, were sometimes granted too
slow access to properly use internet. Mails were sent to the students stating that the
problem and the importance of it were recognized, and I feel like the Wi-Fi did indeed
improve. Later in the semester, I did not have problems often anymore.
Email is another topic. I saw people opening there email and having 5000 unread
mails. You may at times expect 20 mails daily, mainly about activities taking place.
Furthermore, you will receive at least one mail a day ‘updating’ everyone, but I felt like it
was almost never important. These mails actually were annoying, not least because
academically important mails from professors etcetera were also sent to this same email.
You can unsubscribe from ‘student activities’, and save a lot of reading and deleting, but
sometimes there were nice activities in there, so I chose not to.
The pre-arrival information was received on time, although not perfect. The essential Turkish
that was sent along with it, for instance, contained typos and ‘weird’ Turkish. I would advise
future students to play some Duolingo Turkish for a bit, or better yet do a course before.
However, I managed to get by eventually with barely knowing a word before I got there.
Hearing the language everywhere and lack of English knowledge of others result in a steady
learning of the new language.
I got lost in finding out which visa I should obtain: a student visa is a whole lot more
effort and hassle than a tourist visa, and it turned out that a tourist visa sufficed. A student
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visa requires an appointment with the consulate, much more waiting time and more
documents including income statements and so on. It is also more expensive. The tourist visa
is easy to obtain, and you just need to get a residence permit once you are there. The
residence permit application session was scheduled in the orientation week, and although
we were asked to fill it out before arrival, we had to redo it and follow the instructions we
were given. This session was poorly organised, but it worked out in the end and everyone
was trying to be helpful. Also, you have to make sure your health insurance is organised
properly. In my case (as a Dutch citizen) I simply needed to request a 111-form from my
Dutch health insurance. This was stated in the pre-arrival information.
The orientation week was mandatory and amazing. I got to learn lots of nice and interesting
people from all over the world, although the number of exchange students was much lower
than usual, and also much lower than planned for the semester. Many universities and
individual cases called of the exchange due to attacks and political instability. An absolute
shame in my opinion, I say in hindsight, but very understandable. I hope many were able to
do exchange somewhere else or are able to do exchange at another point. We got to know a
little bit of survival Turkish, met typical Turkish foods, played games, went out partying and
we met our student mentors.
The student mentors were a great part of exchange at Koç. They organised various
activities and have come to be our guides at first and many remained our friends throughout
the semester. Whenever you needed anyone to explain procedures or were in need of
translation (Turkish is used everywhere, and English is not so commonly known). Changes to
this have been made though. Many mentors were fired toward the end of the semester by
the Office of International Programs, on highly ambiguous account of not fulfilling unstated
requirements towards OIP. For the next semester, mentors are not to be friends with the
exchange students anymore. Relations need to be wound of smoothly once the students are
capable of taking care of themselves. OIP has a point, though, in needing less mentors since
the number of incoming exchange students is dropping. The mentors were awesome.
In my semester, about 70 exchange students were present. In years before, numbers
went up as high as 250 I have been told, but since various attacks on Istanbul and political
unrest, the number has dropped steadily. For the upcoming spring semester (2017), 10 of
the 70 exchange students will remain for another semester, and in addition to these 10 only
30 more exchange students are expected. It seems the exchange community is sadly cutting
its size.
I spent about 400 euros a month for housing all inclusive, which is quite a lot for Turkey. I
lived with three other exchange students who I met through the ‘incoming exchange
students’ Facebook group, created by Koç’s OIP. We lived in a rather huge apartment , which
allowed for many people to come and chill at our place, and for parties comfortably hosting
a fair number of people. Living in dorms cost about 1300 USD for the semester if I recall
correctly, which is a bit cheaper (over 300 euros a month). Some people, though, found
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residence downtown, in Besiktas for instance, for about 800 or 900 TL per month, all
inclusive. The exchange rates fluctuated a lot though, influencing prices: When I arrived
there, 1 euro got me about 3.2 TL, whereas 1 euro was 4 TL at the moment of leaving.
The cheap cafeteria on campus costs about 6-8 TL for a meal, which was around 2.50
euro when I got there, and is with the current exchange rate 2 euros. It can get a bit more
expensive depending on whether you want dessert or drinks, or special menu. Other food
facilities charged around 8 TL for pasta (‘pasta’ in Turkish means ‘cake’, by the way), and a
fairly new ‘home-made’ food corner charged up to 15 TL for some foods. Eating out usually
starts from 20 TL.
Transport is cheap in Istanbul, especially with your discount student card. Using a bus
will only cost you 1.15 TL, and consecutive travels cost less. So the metro after using the bus
will cost you a mere 0.50 TL, which is now about 0.13 euro. The ferry between the European
and Asian sides use the same prices.
For books, some spent 200 TL or less, others up to 300-400.
There were no holiday breaks in the Fall semester, but as described below, weekends were
generally long. Generally, tests are graded a bit easier than here. The academic level is a bit
lower and my average went up on exchange. I do feel though, that I learned a lot from
certain courses. There was a big difference in knowledge gained from different courses
though.
Exchange students were able to choose any courses of their liking, as long as it fitted their
schedule. We had to compose our schedule before a certain moment, on which enrolment
would open and courses would be distributed on a first come first serve basis. Composing
the schedule, however, did not go flawlessly. It turned out quite some courses were not
given, and multiple timetable conflicts occurred. In the end, some students did not even
manage to schedule and enrol enough courses and had to contact their own university. But
in most cases, including mine, it worked out in the end.
Most people did not have classes on Friday, although some did. My schedule was
11.30 until 17.15 on Mondays, and 11.30 until 14.15 on Tuesday through Thursday. I started
off with 8.30 classes on Tuesday and Thursday, but because of the limited amount of people
in this course, the professor decided to merge his two classes in that course. I now had
classes from 11.30. Three days free at the end of the week is of course nice, allowing for you
to visit some places or to go out in the evening and sleep in the next day. Often though and
rightfully so, you need to spend some of your weekend on academic work.
I felt like I should take the opportunity to learn Turkish while I was there, so I took the
basic Turkish course. However, since language courses were not accepted for my minor
(University College from TSH), I did it as extra course. I had to obtain 24 ECTS and did 30.
The courses I chose were as follows:
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Course
Prerequisites
Exam
ECTS
Comments
TURK201
Basic Turkish
None
Written and
spoken
6
Helpful for daily life,
and the pace is not too
high so you can keep
up.
INTL375
Eurasia:
Politics and
Society Since
1914
Some International
Relations courses
(INTL101 and
INTL204), or
consent of the
instructor
Written
6
Exams and quizzes.
Quite some work, but
gained the most
knowledge from this
course.
MAVA418
Media
Planning
None
Written
6
Fairly easy. The exam
was open book.
PHIL432
None
Philosophical
Perspectives
on Gender
Three essays
6
Personally not my
favourite course, but
others liked it.
SOSC108
None
Social
Origins of
Wealth,
Poverty and
Development
Written
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I definitely recommend exchange for anyone ready to broaden their perspective, and to see
different cultures up close for a longer period of time. For Istanbul in particular, I am really
glad I went there, but would most likely not apply for an exchange there right now, until the
situation has calmed down and the (exchange) community is vibrant again.
Finally, it may (and did) happen that the Turkish government interferes with proper use of
Wi-Fi or social media accessibility. For when this should happen, it might be wise to install a
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VPN network app on your phone, so that internet access is made available through another
country’s server.
For a view of the campus, I refer to the youtube videos of Koç University:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPWvMHmkhcU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhBJS9C4fQk
Some pictures outside of Istanbul:
Kaş, Scuba diving trip. Close to Antalya.
OIP also organised a trip to Kapadokya:
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