International Trade and Finance

Hello, I'm Associate Professor Aytuğ Sözer. I am a faculty member in the Department of International Trade and Finance. My specialty is international management and strategy. Before I started working in the academy, I worked in marketing and export sales units in multinational companies. I've been working in the university since 2010. Our department is located in the Yalova university central campus within the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences. Our language of instruction is Turkish. We only have a formal curriculum. Our current quota is 62. However, we are preferred for horizontal and vertical transfers and international students. Our department has a very up-to-date syllabus. Consisting of competency and specialization based programs. In competency courses, we focus primarily on English language courses. We have English courses every semester. Besides these, we have IT classes. For example, there are courses such as Programming, Applied E-Commerce and Simulation courses. In addition, we have analytical courses focused on problem solving such as Trade Mathematics, Statistics, Econometrics. Of course, we also have expertise courses. We also have sales, marketing, logistics, operations management and financing courses related to international trade. In addition to our training and study areas of our department, we have computer laboratories that we use extensively. Our students can do an on-demand internship for 1 month during the summer periods following the 2nd and 3rd years. In addition, there is also optional workplace vocational training in the last semester. Here, our students can complete the whole semester by studying at work. Finally, in the 8th semester, we have a mandatory graduation project in which we expect our students to collect data from the field. Thanks to the advantages unique to our department and our field, our students can participate comfortably in mobility programs such as Erasmus, Mevlana and Farabi, and we strongly recommend this. They can study at various universities for 1 or 2 semesters abroad at universities and departments. As a department, we organize technical trips every semester. These are usually factory and port trips. We want each of our students to have an understanding of day-to-day operations at factories and ports. In addition, of course, there are seminars and webinars with invited speakers organized by students and clubs. Students who graduate from our department can work in foreign trade departments of enterprises, international operations units of banks, international transport and logistics companies and related government institutions. They can also start new businesses and become international entrepreneurs to create jobs and innovate if they want to. My advice to students is not only to learn from the courses. Be sure to keep in touch with their teachers and advisors. They should do as much as they can to learn from them. In addition, they should work in enterprises, non-governmental organizations or student clubs throughout their education. This will be one of the most important things they will do to develop their skills. For our students coming to our university from outside the city, I would like to point out that Yalova is a very lovely and compact city. Although the population is small, the variety of things to do is great, and the commute is also comfortable. In addition, there are social areas and sports fields within our university. Private and state student dormitories can also be found in the vicinity of the university. I wish the prospective students success in their university life.