Ten summers in a factory, and a habit of measuring things.
I’m studying Mechanical Engineering with Business Finance at UCL, and I grew up around manufacturing. My family’s business, DESA, makes leather goods in İstanbul. I spent summers there from the age of nine, first in production, later in e-commerce and automation. After ten years of that, a factory floor is familiar ground to me, and most of what I find interesting comes from the machines on it that nobody has put a sensor on yet.
The projects on this site follow the same pattern. I build the physical thing, then work out how to tell whether it’s any good. The motor needed a tachometer and seven runs before its efficiency curve meant anything. The kart needed telemetry before a lap time was more than a stopwatch reading. The wiring loom was 239 decisions that had to live somewhere better than my head.
Olmazı Oldurmak
DESA’s history was written up as a book by the journalist Nuri M. Çolakoğlu, Olmazı Oldurmak, which translates roughly to making the impossible happen. I did two things to it.
I translated it from Turkish into English: 237 pages, checked and published. It’s the longest piece of English I’ve produced, and it was harder than writing my own text, because when you write you can steer around a sentence you only half understand. Translating gives you no way past it.
I also read the Turkish audiobook. That took a week in a professional studio in the summer of 2025, at least four hours a day at the microphone. Narration turned out to be mostly a stamina problem. It’s on Storytel, and I’m credited on the listing if you want to check.
Robert College Student Council
I spent two years on the council, climbing it a rung at a time: level representative from January 2023, vice president from December 2023, and president from April to December 2024.
The council holds a real budget, negotiates with commercial sponsors, and runs the events most of the school year is organised around. The biggest of them is the Fine Arts Festival, the largest and oldest high-school festival in Turkey, which I ran as head organiser on a $50,000 budget with thirteen sponsors. Alongside it sat the Spring Ball and the ordinary work of representing about a thousand students to an administration.
The constitution
The presidency didn’t come to me by election. A few months into my term as vice president, the council voted the president out.
Under the constitution I succeeded him. The problem was that the clause permitting a president to be removed didn’t explicitly exist. The document had been written alongside the student council roughly a hundred years earlier, and it had never anticipated the situation we were in. So my first job in the role was to establish that I was legitimately in it, working with the school administration on a reform of parts of the constitution that formalised both the removal process and the succession that followed from it.
It’s still the strangest thing I’ve done, and I’m happy to be asked about it.
I’ve stayed close to it since. I serve as an alumni class representative for RC‘25, which keeps me connected to the cohort and to the wider Robert College community.
At graduation I was given two of the school’s leaving awards: the Herbert Lane Award, voted by my own class for contribution to the cohort, and the Hüseyin Pektaş Award, given by the administration for leadership across a Robert College career. The first one means more to me because my classmates chose it.
Endurance
I train and race triathlon and trail ultra distances.
In June 2026 I finished Challenge Kaiserwinkl-Walchsee at the middle distance in 7:24, in 38 °C heat in humid mountain and lakeside terrain. It was the hardest day I’ve had in sport. In 2025 I ran the Merrell Belgrade Ultra 30 K. I’ve qualified for the Bosphorus Cross-Continental Swim on 23 August 2026, with an 800 m qualifier time of 13:29 against a cutoff around 15:10. Next is Challenge Almere-Amsterdam at middle distance in September.
Training is on Strava if you want to see the day-to-day rather than the finish-line photos.
Underwater
I’ve been diving since I was eight, and I’m PADI Advanced Open Water and Nitrox certified with more than a hundred dives: the Maldives, and reefs, wrecks and sunken aircraft around Türkiye.
At school I was the scuba club’s safety diver for most dives, being one of the more experienced students. In practice that meant teaching new divers to set up a BC and check their own kit properly before getting in.
Also
I play flute and guitar, and I sing. At the 2024 festival I was on the main stage of the event I was supposed to be running. I lift. I speak Turkish natively, English at C2, German at B2 and some French.
I’m looking for a summer 2027 placement. If you have work where hardware, instrumentation and careful bookkeeping matter, get in touch.
