3 BS Alumni

Ece Nur Balık (IE) works as a Business and Data Analyst at KoçZer, one of the Koç Group Companies. Ece Nur completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Özyeğin University Department of Industrial Engineering with a high honor degree. She worked voluntarily for Kahve Dünyası and Fiba Commercial Properties companies with the non-credit summer internship programs offered by our university, during her undergraduate education. She was selected for the international internship program organized by our university for successful students and had the opportunity to see business life in a different culture at Anchor Group in Romania. Ece Nur completed her internships which gave her a variety of professional perspectives, at Adel Kalemcilik and DHL Supply Chain companies on creating value and ensuring efficiency in business processes in supply chain.

Ece Nur, who studied in Finland for 4 months with the Erasmus Student Exchange Program, being one of the students representing our university in the Joost Peters Student Business Challenge held in the Netherlands the next year, developed projects with students from different cultures during her undergraduate period.

In the master's program which she started after her undergraduate education, she worked on the "Open-End Bin Packing Problem with Conflicts", a new topic in the combinatorial optimization literature and adapted various algorithms to this problem, developed a metaheuristic algorithm that would perform better than these algorithms under the leadership of her thesis advisor Prof. Dr. Ali Ekici. She presented her work at the ISCO2022 (International Symposium on Combinatorial Optimization) conference.

Ece (ME), works as a Senior Specialist Engineer in the Truck R&D department of Mercedes Benz Turk A.S. company. As part of her job description, she contributes to the development of electric heavy/medium truck concepts. Gaining experience in the application areas of engineering during her internships, Ece received training in automotive design in 2015 and completed 2 separate design projects during this time. Afterwards, she studied at Pforzheim University as an exchange student with an Erasmus+ scholarship. Between May-October 2017, she worked as a TÜBITAK scholar in the project titled "Dynamics of Drops That Hit Moving Surfaces and Its Use in Surface Coating and Spray Technologies".

In her undergraduate thesis, she worked on the optimization of the anti-roll bar of Mercedes heavy class construction site trucks. With this work she did with her teammate, they won the third prize in the 7th automotive R&D project market and component design competition in 2018. Within the scope of the same project, they also transferred their work to an academic article and this study was published in the International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE), one of the largest mechanical engineering conferences in the world.

After her graduation, she started to work for TUSAŞ Motor Sanayii A.Ş. as a Structural Analysis Engineer. Between the years 2018-2022, she worked in the TEI-TS1400 Turboshaft Engine Development Project, which is Turkey's first type certificated original and national engine. She returned to the automotive sector as of April 2022 and still continues her work at Mercedes Benz Türk A.Ş.

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.