3 BS Alumni

Birce received her bachelor’s degree from the Department of Industrial Engineering at Ozyegin University. During her undergraduate education, she developed an interest in supply chain management and acquired skills in the field through relevant coursework. She participated in Unilever’s Supply Chain Reaction Project in her senior year, gaining valuable experience that allowed her to bridge the gap between theory and practice. She also took on roles in extracurricular activities throughout bachelor’s, such as serving as a peer advisor in OZU Peer Advisor Program and being a member of student clubs.

She pursued her education by commencing a master’s program within the same department, where she focused her research on humanitarian logistics and disaster management with the motivation of making contributions to society. She enhanced her proficiency in applying advanced analytical methods and Operations Research techniques to support decision-making in the related fields. Additionally, she served as a teaching assistant during her master’s studies, which further honed her academic and professional skills.

She is currently in her third year as a Ph.D. student at HEC Montréal, specializing in the Department of Logistics and Operations Management. Her doctoral thesis focuses on humanitarian supply chain network design and management. She has received prestigious awards and scholarships in recognition of her academic achievements during her doctoral studies, including Merit Scholarship Program for Foreign Students (PBEEE), Foundation J. Armand Bombardier Scholarship, and CIRRELT Doctoral Excellence Scholarship.

Berke Söylemezoğlu (IE) works as a brand manager at P&G. Giving great importance to the social activities provided by the university during his student period, Berke played in 5 theater plays with the OzU Chamber Theater in the first 3 years of his OzU adventure and participated in festivals. Then, he became the president of the OzU Operations Research Club, which he founded with his friends. The club has become the most active and crowded club in Özyeğin within 2 years.

Berke participated in volunteering programs in Lithuania for 2 months and Finland for 2 months during the summer periods as team leader. He had the chance to work with people from different countries and cultures. He also took part as a Peer Advisor in the Peer Advisor program, which Özyeğin University has set up for freshman students to get used to school. After graduation, he continued to share his experiences by recording podcasts and providing mentoring to university students.

Since Özyeğin University has adopted sectoral education as one of its main focuses, Berke had the opportunity to do a non-credit internships at Fiba Bank and GAP companies within the FIBA Group while he was a freshman. After that, he gained work experience at his internships at Philip Morris, Bayer and Coca Cola Beverage companies. As part of the graduation thesis course of the department of Industrial Engineering, he had the chance to work on a real problem that Unilever is experiencing and found a solution to the problem with the support of our academics.

In the Spring semester of 2020, Berke started as a Business Analyst at Deloitte Consulting company and then moved to P&G as Brand Manager, still continues to work in this position.

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.