Industrial Engineering

I am Prof. Deniz Türsel Eliiyi. Currently I work both as the Head of Department of Industrial Engineering and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture. The Department of Industrial Engineering opened its doors for education by accepting its first students in the fall semester of 2018-2019. We tried to formulate a more up-to-date curriculum in accordance with the requirements of the modern day. While formulating this up-to-date curriculum, we also included more current subjects like management information systems, artificial intelligence and machine learning in addition to the classical subjects of Industrial Engineering like operational research. Our aims behind this can be explained as our desire to educate our students who will graduate from the Department of Industrial Engineering to be ready for their professional lives with a good knowledge of coding, continue their skills after graduation as well and to become well-prepared engineers. Our department is located in our Izmir - Menemen - Seyrek campus. We have fundamental engineering courses like in every department of engineering. In addition, we have traditional Industrial Engineering courses like operational research, simulation and production planning; however, apart from these we have also included courses different from other Industrial Engineering departments such as management information systems courses and courses towards informatics, coding and computers to formulate our curriculum around needs of the modern day. Our university has 4 computer laboratories which we use for our departmental courses, and additionally we have a Work Study and Ergonomics Laboratory solely for the use of the Department of Industrial Engineering. All the laboratory infrastructure needed in our department to continue our education is ready for use. I can say we are very assertive in terms of our internship and graduation projects as a faculty. We have designed a design and application model with various options where our students can improve their design and application skills in this regard, and we will apply this model for all the departments of our faculty. Our students are still at their 3rd year, but this model provides different options where they start their summer internship in the summer of their 3rd year, which will continue with their graduation project in the first semester of the 4th year and then continue with a long-term internship in the following term or projects enriched through university-industry cooperation. We believe this model will produce strong engineers with improved skills both in application and in design, which is why we have designed this model. We are at the process of putting into practice some protocols with several businesses to apply this model. In terms of the possibilities to study abroad, our department has agreements with countries such as Portugal, Germany and Latvia as part of Erasmus and Exchange programmes. We already have students who started studying in these departments as part of the Exchange programme; however, we should say that we are still a young university and that these agreements will be expanded. I believe as these agreements expand; more students will have the chance to benefit from these agreements. Faculty members at our department have taken part in a number of science events in national and international organisations and continue to do so. Even though we are a newly established department, I can gladly say that we have a publishing performance that is above the Turkish average thanks to the young and dynamic structure of our faculty members at the department. Our work in this field is ongoing of course. We also really want to host national and international organisations especially in the fields of operational research, artificial intelligence and ergonomics and hopefully we will organise these kinds of events in the future. The field of work for industrial engineers is very vast as is known. One of the first fields that come to mind is of course the production sector. Our students will have the chance to work in diverse positions in the production sector from production planning to quality management as well as in the banking sector, public institutions and the information sector. Thanks to the courses in the field of informatics in our curriculum that I have mentioned, we believe we can widen this perspective even further. I believe engineers today should have a coding knowledge above average when they graduate no matter which branch of engineering they graduate from. Accordingly, we have formulated our curriculum in this regard and aim to graduate our students equipped with this knowledge. Different from classical curricula in the Departments of Industrial Engineering, here in Izmir Bakırçay University Department of Engineering we include subjects such as sustainable systems, data analytics and management information systems. Therefore, I think our up-to-date curriculum can be a source of attraction for students. Izmir, and I am also from Izmir, is a source of attraction itself with its proximity to areas of production as well as a number of industry sites near our campus, free zones and firms; and our students can seize various opportunities in their professional lives and carry out their internships in these firms. The proximity of Izmir Bakırçay University to the Organised Industry Sites also enables our students to make good connections with these workplaces while they are still students. Izmir is also a city of fairs, and I believe our students can also reach social opportunities in the city centre. Our university also has student clubs, which are very active. We also have student clubs in the Department of Industrial Engineering and if students take part in these clubs and play active roles here, they can graduate as a lot more proficient and well-equipped people. In addition to the standard transcript with the scores that students have got in their courses, we are also planning to issue a social transcript. This social transcript will in a way show the social skills that they have acquired during the 4 years that they have spent here. So, we think this transcript will also be important and will help our graduates to stand out. We are looking forward to meeting the candidates who will choose our department and our university.