Monday, October 29, 2012

Ideal University


My idea of an ideal University starts with the setting. It can be like ODTÜ, with green areas, forest, chestnut trees and a ring-bus. The buildings should be different in their architecture. The building of humanities would be a kind of art nouveau, engineering would have more modern structures in their building, and faculty of education would have big windows and floating shape. Of course the other faculties also have a specific architecture BUT all have the same color at the frontage, because it should be a kind of unit.
This unit can be changed by students, but just by their own work! They can let run color down from the top of their building, but only when they are able to organize it. It is allowed to put posters or kind of street art on the walls of the building, as long as the majority of the faculty is ok with it. If not, every student is allowed to put it away or change it. I hope that this helps student to identify themselves with their building and that they create a message they want to tell people who come to their faculty.
Studying at this University would be more for yourself and not for your potential employer! There would be an international system ( like bologna is) but it would be more open and it would be without pressure of time. You are able to choose courses from other studies, if you are interested in. At this University it would not depend if you graduate with 23 or 32 because everybody would know that you took your time to learn things for yourself and not only to be a “good”-member of society.
In my ideal University everyone is allowed to come in because it is a place where you can swap ideas and opinions with every type of human being. Working class, graduated, undergraduate, professors, grandfathers and grandmother are discussing and every opinion is worth the same. Of cause my ideal University is utopia but when I reflect this short text and ideas I wrote down, I have to admit that I took things I experienced in Bremen and here at ODTÜ.

Being a student at Middle East Technical University

My home University is the University of Bremen, now I am at METU (Middle East Technical University) for studies abroad.
My first impression of METU was that it’s like American Universities. It was new for me that a Campus side is separated and people only come in with an ID, it was new that teachers and students can live directly at the University area and also the feeling of an own society at METU was new for me.
I don’t really know how to describe my feelings, because I’m just a temporarily student and that’s how some people and teachers treat me. I think that I am lucky to be in our department , here it is different than in my other classes. My impression is that teachers are fine with it when foreign students are coming to their classes, they are interested in others opinion, they take care and want to include you as a “normal” or real METU-Student. That’s what I really appreciate!
My other classes are stricter (means: you shouldn’t ask why to do something, just do it because the teacher said it!), the teachers are not interested in different opinions and often they keep talking in Turkish and other students have to translate it for me and other foreign students. The simplest thing to recognize that they are not interested is, when they never ask you “What’s your name?”. I’m sure that at least two of five teachers didn’t ask me about that. But well…
Let’s talk about nicer things. I really like the fellow students! All people I really talked to are open minded, polite, interested and take care of other people. It is amazing how helpful students are at METU. I enjoy discussions we have with each other, the curiosity from both sides.
In the end I would like to say that, for myself, I feel like a METU-Student. It took around about two weeks at University but since that time I do identify myself with the view I have from METU-Students and I want to take this attitude back to my home University.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Fall Term in Ankara

Selam! As you know I'm at METU/ODTÜ...



I start this blog because of a class named "Contextual Grammar".
Here at ODTÜ we have a lot of classes wich are so nice, but also nice sportsclubs, nice studentgroups and very, very nice people! It's a place to be...


Probably it is a kind of art, isn't it?!


By the way, when we are talking about Art, I found a report about something interesting in Hong Kong:

Until 10 November, visitors can look down on 16 giant portraits pasted high above one of the city’s busiest
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thoroughfares, part of a global project by award-winning French artist JR.
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Most Hong Kongers spend a lot of their time looking upwards -- to admire the striking skyscrapers; to
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observe the nightly light show; or to suss out the day's pollution levels. But with his new public art
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installation, French artist JR has a different mission: to make people look down.
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The award winning 29 year old assembled16 black-and-white portraits of Hong Kong residents, set them against black polka-dotted backgrounds and pasted them on the roof of an overpass above one of Hong Kong's busiest thoroughfares, Connaught Road in the Central district. To see the installation you will have to find a high-rise vantage point and look down -- way down.
This piece is the latest in JR's Inside Out project, a series of photographs embedded in dozens of urban landscapes from Los Angeles and Shanghai to Perth and Nairobi. The large-scale portraits are pasted up in prominent locations -- on walls, floors, facades, roofs or any available exposed surfaces – and his subjects, all residents of the city, are kept anonymous in an attempt to grapple with the issue of personal identity and to make people think about the untold stories of everyday citizens. The visages gracing the Hong Kong walkway, measuring a massive 6m by 6m each, were selected from a pool of 175 applicants who were all photographed for the project.
The adorned overpass, co-organized by French art gallery Galerie Perrotin, whose Hong Kong outpost is just five months old, and the French consulate in Hong Kong and Macau,  runs concurrently with Pattern, an exhibition at the gallery that features other works from JR's Inside Out project, as well as a photo booth for Hong Kongers to take their own portraits. Both the indoor and outdoor elements will run through 10 November.
Worry not, visitors to Hong Kong will not have to sneak past security guards at the tall office towers surrounding the walkway to catch a glimpse of it. There are a number of public lookouts, including Galerie Perrotin itself, the 55th floor of the nearby skyscraper Two International Finance Centre (IFC) across the street, and certain northern-facing parts of the IFC Mall.
Hana R Alberts is the Hong Kong Localite for BBC Travel