3 BS Alumni

İrem Karamete (IE) was the captain of the fencing team of the university for 5 years during her student life and won many Turkish Champion titles for the university. She became the first fencer to represent Turkey after 32 years by qualifying for the 2016 Rio Olympics while she graduated from the university. Benefiting from the opportunities offered by the university as well as her heavy sports life, İrem had the opportunity to do a summer internship at GAP company within FIBA Group and Amsterdam Credit Europe Bank (CEB). 

As soon as İrem graduated from Özyeğin University, she completed her master's degree in Global Marketing Management at Boston University. Completing her American adventure, İrem moved to Italy in 2019 to prepare for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and represented our country in the olympics twice. 

She is the president of the Fencing European Confederation Athlete’s Commission and she also speaks Italian at an advanced level. While she is managing intense sports life, she also works for the one of the most well known Australian online book companies, Fishpond, as an e-commerce manager of Amazon EU accounts. 

Gizem (ME) works as a project coordinator at GÜNSEL EV, the domestic electric vehicle company of Northern Cyprus. Gizem completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Özyeğin University's mechanical engineering department, believing in the importance of a multidisciplinary approach and living in all areas of life. She took active roles in many national and international organizations during both education periods and returned to her country with various awards in the competitions she participated in.

Gizem, who is an ENKA sports club licensed athlete, continued her professional swimming life at her club and university throughout her undergraduate education and took an active role in all inter-university competitions representing Özyeğin University. She founded Özyeğin University's swimming team with her friend Cansu Buket Tokat and achieved many successes in individual and team competitions in Özyeğin's first gold trophy swimming team. At the same time, she worked as a swimming coach during her undergraduate and graduate education and she trained young athletes.

In 2016, Gizem started her master's education under the supervision of Prof. M. Pınar Mengüç. She was selected for the final held in Paris among 19.722 teams from all around the world in the international "Go Green in the City Competition", which she participated with Ebru Tatar in her first year, and was awarded with the "Women in Business Award". At the same time, she worked as a teaching assistant during her graduate education and conducted the chemistry laboratory courses she was assigned to.

In 2018, in the Samsung Bosphorus Intercontinental Swimming Race, which was chosen as the World's Best Open Water Swimming Organization, in which a total of 2400 athletes from 52 countries participated, she won the Silver medal. What makes this race special for her is the successful donation campaign she organized as a TEV volunteer within the scope of the “TEV- Educated Girls, Hopeful Futures” project. In the same year, she won the gold medal in the Çanakkale Boğazı race. She participated in the project management trainings organized by various academies in 2022 and passed the IPMA exam and was awarded the "IPMA Level C: Certified Project Manager" certificate. She has been working as a project coordinator at GÜNSEL EV since the summer of 2020 and has been giving Tango dance training to many employees voluntarily in the dance club she founded in 2022.

Berk Buzcu (CS), graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Özyeğin University in 2020. During his undergraduate years, he had his internship at KoçSistem, where he served as a System Engineer Intern. During his senior year, he worked as a Cloud Consultant in a start-up venture, focusing on cloud systems architecture and also delving into automated negotiation, even participating in the ANAC 2020 competition.

Subsequently, Berk pursued further academic pursuits, enrolling as a Master's Student at Özyeğin University. During this academic journey, he actively contributed to the CHIST-ERA project, "EXPECTATION: Personalized Explainable AI for decentralized agents with heterogeneous knowledge," funded by Tübitak. Within this project, his primary research focus was on the application of explainability techniques in recommender systems, which aligned perfectly with his research interests. The overarching goal was to enhance the effectiveness of recommender systems in helping users achieve their objectives while fostering sociability.

In addition to his thesis research, Berk took on the development of a human-robot negotiation environment and explored other multi-agent-related topics involving Blockchain and drone cooperation. His dedication and contributions led to the publication of five papers during his master's program. Currently, Berk has started working as a Research Assistant at HES-SO, Switzerland on the "Smart-Edge" project where he is working on a healthcare use case for edge computing.