Proud Achievement of İTÜ Students at Stanford University

Four of our students from different departments of Istanbul Technical University have successfully completed 6 weeks of intense training in University Innovation Fellows Program organized by Stanford University Hasso Plattner Institute (d.school) since 2012 and were chosen as university innovation fellows.

İTÜ GINOVACenter for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Boğaziçi University Entrepreneurship Center Bright launched the Fire Up Changemakers Certificate Program to build a student community that will create change on campus by focusing on developing students' entrepreneurship and social innovation skills.Students chosen at the end of this program were nominated as a team from Boğaziçi and İTÜ.

Here are those successful young people:

Cansu Çevik

I’m a second year student of İTÜ Environmental Engineering. In November 2019 I became a P2 licensed paragliding pilot in an organization of İTÜ Aviation Club; I work in the club. I am one of the four students who have attended the ITU Ginova - Boğaziçi Bright Changemakers Program Fire Up project last March and were qualified to attend Stanford University’s program, which is one of the milestones in my life. This process was enjoyable but intensefor us; it gave me an acceleration that helped me take many steps I didn’t believe I could. I want to base my future goals on innovation projects. Within the scope of Stanford UIF, I will work with GINOVA and work in the organization of “Open Innovation Calls” that will be formed for the İTÜ ecosystem. I would like to thank ITU GINOVA that supported us during the process.

Selenay Sonay Tufan

I’m a second year student of İTÜ Mechanical Engineering. I am very happy to be nominated by ITU GINOVA for this program organized under Stanford University. Since the day I was included in University Innovation Fellows program, I had a beautiful experience for my personal journey as well as a chance to find a solution to one of our University’s problems. In this program, I had dozens of memories with my team I will never forget, which were sometimes difficult, sometimes enjoyable, and we worked a lot. As a result of this hard work, we developed five projects, four of which were individual and one as a team. My project focuses on improving our University’s social life. Through activities to be organized within the scope of this project, we will try to increase the number of innovative and entrepreneurial students in our University while also contributing to our University’s social life. I hope that we can create with our projectsa positive effect for everyone. I would like to express my endless thanks first of all to Istanbul Technical University, and then to ITU GINOVA, Stanford University, all my teammates, my advisors and everyone who supported us.

Selin Yılmaz

Selin is a third year student of Management Engineering.  She took part as a Student Mentor in the mentor program organized by Management Engineering Club, and she works as an assistant in a European Commission project on the role of boundary spannersin removing the barriers in university-industry cooperation, where ITU is among the partners.Within Stanford UIF program, she will work on an interface project for information transfer from project teams to be constructedwith the cooperation of ITU GINOVA to the industry.

Serhat Bilge

Fourth year student of Mining Engineering; works as an Innovation Accelerator at Eczacıbaşı Holding Innovation Entrepreneurship Coordination Office. He wants to become a techno-anthropologist in the future and work on service and experience design towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) by modeling human behavior in the digital environment, and he thinks that being an engineer will make a difference in this plan. Within the scope of Stanford UIF, he will work on the Innovation Discourse for the İTÜ ecosystem together with GINOVA.

About the Program

UIF program aims to strengthen the links in the ecosystem through innovative projects developed by students by becoming “agents of change” in their universities. In the 6-week training given by d.school within the scope of the program, it is aimed that students absorb the use of certain tools and resources in order to make an in-depthanalysis of their campus ecosystems. Fellows who explore topics such as Creative Thinking and Lean Enterpriseuse their knowledge to develop unique projects to meet the needs of their schools.

To get detailed information about the student projectsof UIF İTÜ 2020 team, you can access their uif wiki pages and social media accounts.

UIF İTÜ Change Story: