3 BS Alumni

Berke Söylemezoğlu (IE) works as a brand manager at P&G. Giving great importance to the social activities provided by the university during his student period, Berke played in 5 theater plays with the OzU Chamber Theater in the first 3 years of his OzU adventure and participated in festivals. Then, he became the president of the OzU Operations Research Club, which he founded with his friends. The club has become the most active and crowded club in Özyeğin within 2 years.

Berke participated in volunteering programs in Lithuania for 2 months and Finland for 2 months during the summer periods as team leader. He had the chance to work with people from different countries and cultures. He also took part as a Peer Advisor in the Peer Advisor program, which Özyeğin University has set up for freshman students to get used to school. After graduation, he continued to share his experiences by recording podcasts and providing mentoring to university students.

Since Özyeğin University has adopted sectoral education as one of its main focuses, Berke had the opportunity to do a non-credit internships at Fiba Bank and GAP companies within the FIBA Group while he was a freshman. After that, he gained work experience at his internships at Philip Morris, Bayer and Coca Cola Beverage companies. As part of the graduation thesis course of the department of Industrial Engineering, he had the chance to work on a real problem that Unilever is experiencing and found a solution to the problem with the support of our academics.

In the Spring semester of 2020, Berke started as a Business Analyst at Deloitte Consulting company and then moved to P&G as Brand Manager, still continues to work in this position.

Gözde (IE) is a Data Scientist at Rabobank, which is one of the largest banks in the Netherlands, operating in 38 countries around the world. She works on projects to generate AI solutions to better serve the corporate and the private clients while increasing profitability of the bank.

When she was a junior at Ozyegin University, she had an internship focused on branch workforce optimization in San Diego, California where she had the opportunity to apply her academic knowledge to real case. In her senior year, she continued taking selective courses in the field of data science and graduated from Ozyegin University in 2015 as the valedictorian of her class.

After spending two years as a data scientist in finance sector, she pursued a master's degree in Business Analytics and Operations Research from Tilburg University. She then joined Nielsen, where she improved the marketing budget optimization software and implemented it for various firms in countries such as Brazil, Japan, Canada. Since 2020, she have been working at Rabobank on projects such as identifying the best next product for corporate clients or predicting customer churn, where she employs various machine learning algorithms.

In addition to developing the models, she ensures their implementation in a scalable manner to be used in business decisions. Alongside her projects, she supports other data scientists who would like to improve their coding skills by preparing training sessions and workshops.

Okan (IE) is the Founding Member of Twin Science, the world’s first ed-tech company that combines science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning with SDGs education for young people to raise them as tomorrow’s changemakers. Twin Science has been recognized as a “Technology Pioneer” by the World Economic Forum, won BETT Awards 2020 and the Silver Play for Change Award from Toy Industry of Europe. 

As a student, Okan started his journey with the Young Guru Academy, one of Turkey’s leading NGOs, while studying at university. He was selected as one of the 50 young talents among 50,000 applicants to develop impact-driven projects for refugees, orphans, the visually impaired, and others through volunteerism. 

Passionate about eliminating inequality in education worldwide, Okan has also been leading a social responsibility project called the World Science Movement (WSM). The project aims to give children better access to STEM education. WSM has reached over 500,000 underprivileged children in Cameroon, Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya and Turkey. Okan believes that no curious mind should be left behind and he is dedicated towards working for this purpose until reaching all young people around the world.