Dear Madam/Sir,

I'm Atakan Arıkan, a computer engineering student from Bogazici University in Istanbul. Throughout my bachelor’s education, my university has provided me with a variety of courses but I found that I always enjoyed the courses offered by my own department the most. Solving problems by coming up with efficient algorithms has always been something I do for fun and during these four years I have been consistently engaged with experiences that taught me a lot and that I believe would transfer well to my further studies or career.

During my studies, I've had the chance to learn many programming languages, but the one I consider myself to be most familiar with is Java. Java was the first language we learned at university and since I love OOP, Java served as the perfect tool for me to enjoy and master writing structured code. Since it is the language I've known the longest and have worked with the most, I would consider my level of mastery in Java to be a 4/5. After Java we shifted towards C++, which we used on our Data Structures and Algorithm class. I ended up liking the class so much that I became the teaching assistant for it for two years. That experience proved to be quite a rough challenge which required a lot of mindwork to overcome it, but I think it was one of the experiences that taught me the most in my life. In addition to the aforementioned languages, I also had the chance to use a lot of different languages for university projects such as Verilog, LaTeX, Scheme, Prolog, Assembly, C, etc. I used LaTeX a lot during the period when I was a TA and I'm quite familiar with it, however, I wouldn't feel comfortable working with the other mentioned languages as much as I would with Java, C++ etc. Lastly, I used node.js during my internship and thanks to the the rigorous tasks I had I could say my level of mastery for it would be 4/5.

You can see a list of projects I have done on my GitHub Page: https://github.com/atakanarikan. From this list, Changing the Minix compiler was probably the most challenging. I wasn't that familiar with Minix OS and there isn't enough documentation available on the web, so I had to read through the code and see where the scheduler is located and do the necessary changes. Similarly, Sculture was one of the most complex projects I've ever done. It required a lot of teamwork, communication and development skills from everyone in the team. As expected, not everyone had those skills but nevertheless we had to complete the project. Dividing the workload, implementing the actual website, dealing with the problems in the team proved to be really cumbersome. Despite all of that, however, it was the perfect example of how a workplace could possibly be, and I learned a lot about working with a team thanks to it. For my internship, I had many options to choose from with big companies such as Sony and Turkish Airlines. While I knew I could earn a lot more money by working for a big company, I was absolutely sure I wouldn't be happy doing something I didn't love even if it was for a big company, so I decided to work for a small company like Iyisahne.com instead, because I believe in the power of learning through. Without a doubt, I had many challenges: The workload I faced was so much more than what I would be doing if I worked in a bigger company, and since there were so few of us I had a lot of responsibility so the smallest mistake I would make could be cause a lot of problems for the company. However, to this day, I still believe that I made the right decision with going with Iyisahne, since I also plan to be a part of a successful startup someday.

That brings us to why am I applying University of Tartu for my MD. When i was 17, I decided to have a fulfilling life. That doesn't mean being rich or powerful, but to have a life full of challenges and success. Overcoming a challenge is what makes me happy. In order to fulfill this decision, I studied a lot for the university entrance exam and had a successful result, being 960th out of 3 million students. This result enabled me to be admitted to one of the most prestigious schools in Turkey, which would promise a lot of opportunities for the future, majoring in something that I would enjoy doing for the rest of my life. After five years, now I see myself in the same situation. My desire to have a challenging life and to prove myself has not changed at all. I know what I want: to bring a solution to an existing, hard problem by creating a startup. The only problem I'm facing is that I don't see myself capable of creating and maintaining a startup for the time being, but I think I can overcome this problem with proper training. This the most important reason for why I'm applying for a Masters Programme. Within the available options, your programme stood out to me the most with its impressive curriculum. The way you support enterprise software is what I'm actually looking for and I loved how you encourage students to try their chances at a startup instead of a big company, in the 3rd semester during the internship period.

I'm now in my last semester in Bogazici University and for my graduation project, I will be designing and developing a software system called "A Morphological Analysis System for Turkish". Nature Language Processing has been getting more attention day by day and I do believe it provides great challenges and has a bright future. I'd love to continue working on NLP in the future and even doing my Master's thesis on this topic. Ultimately, what I aim to learn from your programme is, how to avoid mistakes made by others. I want to know what makes a good software, what is actually an issue and which approach would be the best in finding a solution. I do hope this education I'll get will provide me with the skillset that will help me in making important decisions both when designing a software and running a company.


Thank you for your time and considering my application,
Sincerely,
Atakan