Electrical Electronic Engineering

My name is Oğuzhan Erdem, I am the Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Trakya University. Our Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department began to function in 2012 upon the admittance of its first students. Then, after 3 years, it updated its curriculum and switched to 30% English education. Therefore, the undergraduate program education period of our department is 5 years in total, including 1 year of English preparation courses. We have 5 branches under our department: Telecommunications Department or Communications, Control Department, Electrical Installations, Electronics and Electromagnetic Wave and Microwave Theory. Graduates of our department earn the title of Electrical and Electronics Engineer. When our students begin their education in our department upon completing the English preparatory education, they gain an intensive professional experience by taking the basic courses of our departments during the first 6 semesters, or in other words 3 years. Of course, in addition to these basic vocational courses, they take common courses such as Mathematics, Physics, Turkish Language, History of Revolution, which are taught in all engineering departments. Our technical and vocational English courses continue every semester. Students also take elective courses from other departments and faculties of the university. These can be related to any sports such as swimming and basketball. They might take courses with social content such as entrepreneurship, career planning, nutrition, economics, and law. After completing the first 3 years and reaching their final year, our students take advanced technical elective courses provided by the branches of the department in the 7th and 8th semesters. They specialize in one or two fields. Students select technical elective courses in fields of their own choosing and they graduate as specialists in these fields. We also have project classes in the final year. When you look at the curriculum, 30% of our program appears to be in English. However, if we do not count the courses provided by other faculties of the university that our students must take, we will see that almost 60% of our department’s courses are taught in English. In fact, if our students choose English courses among technical elective courses, this rate rises to 70%. At the same time, as I mentioned before, our technical vocational elective courses in English are given to our students every semester. 7 of the courses in our curriculum have laboratory work. This laboratory work starts with the Electrotechnical Laboratory in the 1st year. The Telecommunications Department proceeds with the Basic Electrical and Electronics and Microprocessor laboratories. We have 3 laboratory classrooms. With the supervision of our assistants, our students support the theoretical knowledge they have acquired in the lessons with practice.
The Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering has compulsory basic and occupational summer internships in the 2nd and 3rd years of undergraduate education. Our students pick internships of their own choosing in industrial organizations. Our faculty members provide guidance to our students in combining the theoretical knowledge they have acquired in our department with their newly gained professional experience. When they complete their internship, we conduct evaluation exams in our department to measure their productivity. Graduation projects take place in our last year, in the 7th and 8th semesters. These projects are either based on problems in the current academic literature or they are relevant industry problems. As a result of completing these projects, our students contribute to their resumes and sometimes even develop their own patents. Students can also write articles with our faculty members. To give a concrete example, our students had a software problem related to stock management of an industrial enterprise, and they solved it. Another one of our students developed a smart beehive system based on artificial intelligence. He participated in a competition with this project and became 1st out of 3000 participants in Turkey. He applied to TÜBİTAK, received support and established a company in the Trakya Technology Development Zone. He still owns the company and continues his project. This being said, our students demonstrate what they have learned in the first 6 semesters in the project courses and graduate from here by enriching their resumes. The Foreign Relations Unit of our university coordinates the abroad education opportunities. Out students can study at other universities for 1 or 2 semesters within the scope of the Erasmus, Mevlana and Farabi programs at universities with which we have bilateral agreements. Most of our students go to the Balkans and European countries for the Erasmus program. There are robot competitions organized by our department every year in spring. In these competitions, our students exhibit the projects they have implemented in the department. They also compete against each other in different categories and receive awards. Not only our own students, but also students from different universities and schools in Turkey participate in its festive atmosphere. Our vocational schools, student societies and the Trakya Development Agency are the organizations we collaborate with and receive support from in our projects.
Graduates of our department earn the title of an Electrical and Electronics Engineer. The scope of their possible work is very wide. Graduates go on to find employment in the fields of communication, control, biomedicine, defense industry, information and communication technologies, the IT sector, artificial intelligence, coding, and the generation, distribution and management of electric energy. In addition to these, our students have plenty of job opportunities in a wide range of other fields. Our Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department is the youngest department of our faculty in terms of years since its establishment. At the same time, our faculty members are very successful and young teachers in their fields. All of them are from Turkey's most distinguished universities. Extremely successful publications of each of our professors, who received undergraduate, graduate and doctorate degrees from universities such as Boğaziçi University, Koç University, Middle East Technical University and Istanbul Technical University. They also have experience studying and working abroad together with having national and international patents. My advice to our students is to gain motivation by making the best possible use of the opportunity of working with these young academicians and teachers and to devote themselves to their graduation projects. They should improve themselves by taking advantage of our laboratory facilities every semester. I expect them to dedicate themselves the projects they will carry out together with our faculty members and graduate from here by enriching their resumes. Our students will have a very calm and peaceful education life here during their education period. There will be no accommodation problems. There are various opportunities offered by our university, there may be events organized by the Career Center, they can participate in them. Again, our students can work part-time in our Technology Development Zone. Here they will attend the events organized by different units of our university and graduate from here by developing themselves socially. I wish our students success in their exams. I await them at Edirne, Trakya University, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering.