Side Gigs

Here I talk about some of my extracurricular, not-necessarily-academic interests and activities. It used to be a page on its own, but then I decided it is more suitable here as a blog post now that I actually have a blog. The date published on the blog is not real, I just wanted to have it under all the other blog posts, but I will keep this page updated as I continue these activities (and more, maybe?).

Photography

Photography is actually an old hobby of mine: I started learning about it at around 6th grade in middle school. I was active then for about a year or so, but then I wasn’t for quite some time. As of the fall of 2021, I have taken it up again, more seriously this time. You can see the pictures I am taking at my photo blog or on my Flickr profile.

Aikido

I started practicing aikido in 2019 at METU Aikido Society under Utku Havuç, following the school of Tamura Shihan and his student Nebi Vural Sensei. Although at the time I couldn’t practice as often as I wanted to, I started regularly practising again starting with the pandemic (safely, of course, over Zoom using our weapons). As the COVID-19 prohibitions are relaxed by the government, I have started practising (actual physical training this time) at Katsu Dojo, again under Utku Havuç.

Here are the exams I have passed previously:

• 6th Kyu on 9th of August, 2020
• 5th Kyu on 30th of October, 2020
• 4th Kyu on 13th of December, 2020
• 3rd Kyu on 30th of May, 2021
• 2nd Kyu on 9th of April, 2022

Translation

I am hesitant to call myself a “translator”, but I think I can do so by calling myself an “amateur translator”. I mostly translate English content to Turkish, although in the future, I would like to translate works in French to Turkish and translate Turkish content to English and French as well.

• My most recent translation is Nicky Case’s How to Remember Anything Forever-ish, I translated it from English to Turkish. The content was super fun to read and very easy to understand and retain.
• I, with two other people, have translated the text titled “Jūjutsu, Jūdō and Aikidō”, which is an excerpt from Donald Frederick “Donn” Draeger’s Comprehensive Asian Fighting Arts (8th edition, 1989), which can be found here.
• I am a volunteer TED translator with a couple of videos translated into Turkish. You can find the videos I translated on my TED profile.

Maths Workshop

During the fall of 2019, a high school maths teacher of mine (whom I love very much, hi Başak Hocam!) approached me one day with the idea of creating a workshop on mathematics for second-year high school students. It was going to be something to motivate them into really trying to really understand a subject rather than just memorizing facts and learning to solve templates of questions (the Turkish education system is not very good about this.). I accepted to be the one to deliver the workshop. I was responsible for its content and its delivery, and although my aim was to make it weekly, I could only do it as often as my exam schedule permitted me.

I tried to showcase some mathematical topics that I thought were foreign to them and some interesting basic proofs (infinitude of primes). I tried to select topics they don’t encounter in their regular high school curriculum, to “disarm” them of what they already know and to level the playing ground. I talked about

• some basic linear algebra (the concept of span, linear independence and dimension),
• some graph theory (the Königsberg bridge problem and Eulerian paths), and
• different types of infinities (countable vs uncountable).

At one point, I also found myself talking about

• Fourier series representations of periodic signals (the question was, why do different musical instruments make different noises if we say that they are producing the same note? If they are producing the same notes, what’s the reason behind their different sounds?)
• and, well, the continuum hypothesis (At one point, one of the students went, “I think I might possibly get this…” and that’s plenty for me. Although, I have no doubt that I did a terrible job explaining the topic).

These last two went as well as expected.

The two most valuable lessons I learned are that

• me understanding a topic (or believing so) does not entail me being able to convey it, especially to second-year high school students with a dozen different (and honestly, unexpected) questions.
• me wanting or being excited to talk about stuff especially does not make me good at explaining them.

In the end, I learned a lot and had a lot of fun. We had to stop because of the pandemic at one point, and so I couldn’t cover as much ground as I wanted to. It’s been quite some time since then, and recently I talked with the school to do the workshop online. I will certainly tread more carefully this time if I start doing the workshops again: It will take a lot more work and require a lot more planning, but I feel like it will be worth it in the end.

TEDxMETUAnkara

I booked speakers and worked with them on their speeches and was responsible for the overall operations of TEDxMETUAnkara 2017 “Grand Illusions”. I also designed and managed the event website on Wix.