Graduation Joy at the Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences: Our Dean Addresses the Graduates

We held our 2020–2021 academic year graduation ceremony with great enthusiasm on our new campus, in compliance with mask, distance and hygiene rules! On this day, when we experienced joy and sadness together as we bid farewell to our valued students, our President Prof. Dr. Şirin KARADENİZ and our Dean Prof. Dr. Yavuz GÜNALAY addressed our new graduates with their speeches! They emphasized that we will always stand by our graduates after graduation and will never break our ties! Our graduation ceremony was crowned with the cap toss following the speeches of the faculty and department valedictorians. We congratulate all our graduates and wish them continued success!

Our Dean's Speech

Full Text of Our Dean's Speech

It is so hard to describe this moment, which our students have longed for since the day they entered university and have reached at the end of a demanding journey! Dear students, if you like, pause for a moment and think about the time you have spent at our university (5 seconds of silence): Which moments came to your mind most? Difficulties? Joys? Pain? Stress? The taste of success? The pleasure of learning? The difficulty of honesty? Fear of failure? Loneliness? The strength of togetherness?

What came to my mind was the distress of possibly not being able to keep the promises we made at the beginning. We have been through very difficult times. Under the burden of health problems, the psychological strain caused by the global pandemic and the hardships of loneliness, were we able to offer our students the education and personal development environment we promised them? We have asked ourselves this question so many times over the last 16 months, and we so wanted the effort we made to overcome these difficulties not to have been in vain! I am sure you too have experienced similar feelings over these last 16 months.

Besides this, of course, I am also filled with the joy of my students who have already found jobs, my students who have received admission/scholarships for master's studies, and those who are here to celebrate their success with their families; the heartbreaking pain of the students we have lost; the other difficulties we have faced; and the bittersweet feelings for my students who cannot be here today because, for one reason or another, they were not successful in their courses. But most importantly, we are together here today to experience the spring of a rebirth: Graduation!

You are now among us, ready to be the individuals you wanted to become when you entered university, well equipped and, most importantly, with your diplomas, and we are here to celebrate this.

Dear Graduates,

During your education, while helping you acquire the necessary competencies for your profession, we also tried to instill in you honesty, loyalty to the world and your loved ones, merit and respect for analytical thinking, and to help you adopt as your guiding principle the words of our great leader M. K. Atatürk: "The truest guide in life is science." I hope we have succeeded!

With its "My Campus Is the World" slogan dating back to the 2000s, the BAU family offers its graduates a broad network of solidarity, with campuses on 4 continents, alumni groups on 5 continents and more than 40,000 alumni. With more than 7,000 alumni, our Faculty forms the cornerstones of this broad community. I hope that with your graduation you will gain even more than the experience and knowledge you acquired during your education. We are not simply sending you off from our university with a diploma; with this diploma, we are inviting and connecting you to a much broader community and alliance. Use this strength. In the future, when you start or embark on a new job, or move to a new country or even a new continent, you can check whether we have a connection there and get information.

Of course, if there is no connection there, it means it is your turn to add this new experience to the BAU alumni network. The honor of making this connection and strengthening our community awaits you. Come on, roll up your sleeves, BAU graduate; we are behind you. The support you need will reach you.

Today, we are proud that our female students make up 60% of our graduates. Atatürk's words "Everything in the world is the work of women" are our guiding principle too. Women's contribution to the workforce, women taking the place they deserve in society, and women rising from working life to the management levels of the public and private sectors, so that the celebration of 8 March as International Working Women's Day remains a historical symbol, are the common goal and wish of our Faculty. With the support of our Chair of the Board of Trustees Mr. Enver Yücel, who is the President of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) International Training Center in Türkiye, academic studies are carried out in our Faculty on gender equality, equal opportunities in education, and the rights and problems of migrants and refugees, and our research centers contribute to national and international projects. We believe that you, our graduates, equipped with the up-to-date knowledge produced by these studies, will establish principles for your working and social lives that value gender equality (or, to put it more simply, equal rights and opportunities for women and men), which may fundamentally affect all these problems in the rest of your lives.

Especially in these days, when global migration and refugee problems, alongside the global pandemic, are fueling nationalist sentiments in certain countries, it makes us proud that our country seeks conciliatory solutions to these problems. One in every 8 students at our University is an international student. In our Faculty, 763 international students from 69 different countries are studying, and this year we are graduating 93 international students. I think this is the finest example of our Faculty passing on to our students its experience in internationalization and living together with different cultures. As you graduate with all this accumulated experience, I would like to remind you young people of another saying of our national leader: "Peace at home, peace in the world."

Dear Graduates,

May you all stay in peace, stay healthy, and may your road be open.

Moments from the Graduation