3 BS Alumni

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.

Yıldıray Yılmaz (CE), received his bachelor’s degree at Özyeğin University with a high-honor certificate in the civil engineering department. He is awarded as being the highest ranked student among 2020 graduation class. During his undergraduate studies, he founded Özyeğin University’s Construction Club and ran as president for two years. The construction club has reached more than 200 members during his presidency and organized more than 20 different events.

His original research paper was published with the great help of Dr. Seyis at ‘Building and Environment’ journal under the title of ‘Mapping the scientific research of the life cycle assessment in the construction industry: A scientometric analysis’.

Parallel with his master studies, he joined Metsims Sustainability Consulting company in October 2021. For over a year, he works as a sustainability consultant. His primary task is to analyze and model the environmental burdens of construction products and building from life cycle perspective. So far, he has modelled and assessed the environmental impacts of 20+ different construction products and one residential and one factory building. Besides environmental performance modelling, he currently works on improving one of the biggest life cycle assessment database for construction products in the world.

Naz (CS) worked in Microsoft as a trainee when she was a sophomore. During this tenure, she regularly contributed to young children in teaching computer programming and promotional activities. During her internship at Vodafone, she worked in Data Science R&D and Business Intelligence IT departments. She got 3 patents and she had the opportunity to be the "first author" in all these patents. In her last year, she was elected to represent Özyeğin University's Faculty of Engineering in the Müdek accreditation committee.

After graduating from Özyeğin University, she did her Master's in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Leuven in Belgium. She completed this advanced master's program as an honor student in 1 year. She worked as a data scientist at Amazon Netherlands for 4 years. In this process, she provided consultancy to many companies in the Fortune 400 list in the field of artificial intelligence. She took part in the project that added artificial intelligence to the races of Formula 1. Finally, she started to work in Google, Netherlands. She is currently working at Google as a Machine Learning Specialist Engineer.