The University is pleased to announce the recipients of the Distinguished Teacher of the Year Awards for 2014. Assoc. Prof. Selim Aksoy, Asst. Prof. Berrak Burçak, Prof. Hitay Özbay and Asst. Prof. Emrah Özensoy were chosen for demonstrating outstanding teaching abilities and for contributing to students’ academic and intellectual development. Bilkent News asked this year’s Distinguished Teachers for their thoughts on receiving this award.
Assoc. Prof. Selim Aksoy, Department of Computer Engineering
I am deeply honored to receive this award. I believe that a good teacher should her/himself be a good learner, and lead students by example by asking a lot of questions and by learning from the literature, from past experiences and from colleagues. It has been a fun and rewarding experience to continue learning and teaching in the rapidly advancing field of computer science. With realization of the continuous evolution of our students’ interests and expectations in the age of the Internet and smart devices, I have been trying to help them develop as good learners capable of capturing the big picture while also having precise knowledge about details. Thus, I have been trying to focus on how I can make them more curious, so that they can be persistent in their thinking concerning a problem, explore and be critical about alternative solutions, produce innovative ideas and learn more during this entire process. Bilkent University has been a great place for working toward these goals alongside lots of stimulating students and colleagues who both produce new knowledge and work hard to learn more. I would like to thank my past and current students for being part of this exciting experience. Special thanks go to those who provided letters supporting my candidacy for this award. I also would like to thank my colleagues and, in particular, the departmental teaching award committee for nominating me and putting the nomination package together. Last but not least, I thank my family for their love and support.
Asst. Prof. Berrak Burçak, Department of Political Science and Public Administration
I am extremely honored to receive a 2014 Bilkent Distinguished Teacher Award and would like to thank everyone who made this possible. It is always a great privilege to be a part of the Bilkent community, whether as a student as I was many years ago or now as a teacher. It is always a great pleasure and a privilege to be part of the Bilkent community, which I believe has played an important role in shaping who I am today.
I have been blessed with excellent mentors, such as Prof. Halil ?nalc?k, Prof. Norman Itzkowitz and Prof. Özer Ergenç, whose approaches to teaching and learning have shaped my own notion of what constitutes good teaching. I believe that teaching is an evolving and an interactive process, which might be compared to a journey involving two parties, the students and the teacher. I believe that my role as a teacher lies in guiding the students throughout this journey and rendering the learning process rewarding not only in terms of its immediate results for both parties, but also as a lasting model for lifelong learning. Each teaching exercise presents a wonderful opportunity to introduce students to a new attitude toward history, a different method of learning and a rewarding learning experience. Each teaching exercise also presents a unique experience to draw on in order to re/shape my future teaching, because teaching changes and transforms continuously depending on the needs and abilities of the students. I believe that it is this changing nature of teaching as well as the lasting impact of learning **************** that makes teaching a new, exciting and different journey each and every time!
Prof. Hitay Özbay, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
I am very happy and honored to receive a 2014 Distinguished Teaching Award. On this special occasion, I would like to express my gratitude to everybody who contributed to my being given this prestigious recognition, namely my students, TAs, faculty colleagues and past teachers.
I have been very fortunate to have had excellent teachers throughout my university education; many of them have been role models for me. In the early stages of my academic career, senior faculty colleagues, as mentors, gave me guidance that helped me define my own way of teaching. The courses I teach most often tend to be on the theoretical side of engineering. Therefore, it is very challenging to keep students interested in these courses. Since the time I joined the Bilkent University faculty more than a decade ago, the EEE department and the TAs assigned to my courses have been very supportive of my initiatives to incorporate the most recent technological advances/tools into these courses in order to motivate the students. Now, through this award, I am very pleased to see that students have been appreciative of this approach. Of course at Bilkent, I have been very lucky to interact with the best students in the country, if not the world; their curiosity and thirst for greater knowledge have been the driving force behind very productive student-teacher interactions both inside and outside the classroom. I have no doubt that future generations of students will keep pushing us further, so we have to be ready for new challenges.
Asst. Prof. Emrah Özensoy, Department of Chemistry
I am truly grateful and humbled simply for being considered for this award, let alone receiving it. Frankly, I did not see this coming when I was an undergraduate student in the Bilkent Chemistry Department some 15 years ago. This is mostly because of the fact that before I started my academic career, I subscribed to the commonly held and rather vague point of view that research-oriented academicians might have restricted resources, and possibly even less motivation, for teaching. Well, suffice it to say that it did not take too long for me to change my mind, as teaching grew virally in me, eventually constituting a significant portion of my professional endeavors at Bilkent. I guess the personal origins of learning lie in the “motivation to learn,” which goes hand in hand with “appreciation of the instructor by the student,” as well as with making learning somewhat fun, or at least, if possible, not so boring. Over the years, I came to understand that one of the easiest ways to capture student appreciation was to invest the necessary time and effort in academic as well as emotional/social interactions with students by valuing them and treating them with the utmost respect and sincerity, which they deserve. This was actually not so difficult to pursue, as this was the exact “student-centered teaching” approach that had been established and successfully carried out by my excellent former instructors in the Bilkent Chemistry Department, who later turned out to be my beloved colleagues. Thus, I am utterly thankful to all of my excellent current/former students, instructors and colleagues, who have made teaching an absolutely rewarding and an intellectually stimulating learning experience.