Speech of The Board of Trustees

Hello friends, my name is Funda Aktan. I am the Coordinator of the Board of Trustees of the Cappadocia University. The main reason why we started the process of transforming to university was that we realized that educational duration of some programs in vocational school training were insufficient. First, we started off with this idea; because 2-year programs in the vocational school were not enough to compensate for the incompletely acquired basic skills of our students in high schools and also were not enough to teach professional skills in some professions. In some of our programs, we wanted to give training for four or three years, as long as the education required. The only way to do this was to become a graduate college in accordance with current legislation or legal structure of higher education in Turkey. In other words, instead of a vocational college; we would become a Health College if we wanted to specialise in health studies, for example; if we wanted to give training in civil aviation, we had to become a graduate college of civil Aviation or applied sciences. Thus, we started the process of becoming a university out of this need. Cappadocia University was founded on the heritage of Cappadocia Vocational College in Nevşehir. We have been giving education at Cappadocia Vocational College since 2005. Now, we have twenty six different training programs. These twenty-six programs are basically divided into four main departments.

One of them is the Aviation Associate Program. Our most known program is the Aviation Associate Program. Our second department includes the Health Programs. We have another department that we call as the Social Services and the Law programs including Paralegal Associate Program and Criminal Enforcement and Security Services Associate Program that educates guardians for penitentiaries , and also the Social Services Associate Program. There is also another department that we call as Department of Cappadocia Programs including associate programs established parallel to the development planning of the Cappadocia Region. These departments, as I said at the beginning, contain twenty six different associate programs. We provide practice-oriented training within these programs. We are paying attention to provide our trainings entwined together with sectors. We are updating our training programs. We recruit both academicians and sector professionals to enable our students to become well equipped not only with academic knowledge but also with practical knowledge from real sectors. Right upon the structure we have established, we wanted to open up new departments like Graduate Schools of Applied Sciences or Health where we could reflect all of our experience from undergraduate programs. Cappadocia University will come into operation in Mustafapaşa Town where Cappadocia Vocational College is currently established. I want to talk a little about Mustafapaşa. Mustafapaşa, formerly known as Sinasos, is actually one of the richest and most popular towns of Nevsehir before population exchange in 1923. From those dates, almost two hundred ninety registered historic mansions reached present day. This means, it's a town made up of historical mansions. During the development of Cappadocia Vocational College, we established a campus structure spreading through the whole town. When this campus system is mentioned, it is hard to visualize it. Through rentals and purchasing, we placed our various departments into these registered buildings in the town .

Today, the distance education program of Cappadocia Vocational College is broadcast from the madrasah which was built here at the end of 1800's. So the studios are in a madrasah. Our administrative building is in the Haralambos Mansion which is also an old historical building. The campus is spread all over the town. We have no boundaries, no campus walls. This has advantages more than one. One of them is protecting the historical buildings. We believe this is our duty and prefer to spend our resources on raising, restoring and keeping these historic buildings alive rather than constructing new buildings. It was a choice for us. We prefer to use these mansions as long as we do not have to and don't need very large areas, hangars or very special areas for education. So far, we have grown up here. This establishment has another advantage. The campus is open to townfolk. I mean, people living in the town enter the campus, they go in and out. Our students also live in the town. This is an advantage. We can't find such a campus in Turkey. However, I think that our campus can be compared with the establishments of Oxford and Cambridge in England.

With the growth of the Cappadocia University, we expect the number of our students, which is about 4 thousand at the moment, to increase to eight or nine thousand students in the next five years. This is our most advanced goal. To reach this number of students, we will need new classrooms, studios, and practice areas. We will not be able to set up this establishment in Mustafapaşa. Now we are going out of this historic preservation area and spread to other parts of Nevşehir, too. We have an area of seventy-five acres at Nevşehir city center. We are going to construct various buildings here and planning to move graduate colleges to those buildings gradually. We have a very successful Culinary Arts program that has been continuously winning awards. is successful in Culinary Arts and receives awards. We will open the Gastronomy and Culinary Arts Department under the Graduate College of Applied Sciences Science, relying on our experience here there. This program will be opened in the application kitchen, which will be established in Göreme and allocated to us by Göreme Municipality,.

In other words, our plan of campus establishment in Nevşehir province will be structured as Mustafapaşa Town, Culinary Arts application area in Göreme to house gastronomy, culinary arts applications, and application kitchen and main campus in Nevşehir Center. One of the fields, which Cappadocia Vocational College is very challenging, is the aviation field. In 2008, we started to open associate programs in the aviation field. The first one was the Civil Air Transportation Management. Then Aircraft Technology Associate Program and the Cabin Crew Initial Training Associate Program were opened. Lastly, we opened the Flight Despatch Associate Program. From the very first time we started to open these associate programs and started to get students, the need to be within the the aviation industry in Istanbul has appeared. In all our associate programs, practice training is the main point of our training curricula and contents. We pay attention to the presence of implementation in each of our associate programs and, if possible, we want it to be performed within the industry.

When we talk about implimentation, we understand two things. The first is the implementation performed in the college itself. These are the ones performed in our own workshops. The second one is performed as the skill trainings within the industry. Before we send our students to sectors, we do our own practice at school and then send them to the sector for skills training. We did the same thing in the field of aviation and we established a small campus at Sabiha Gökçen Airport. This campus is entirely the campus of aviation associate programs. Our students in Nevşehir find opportunity to com to Sabiha Gökçen Campus and take applied education for their own associate programs. We also give them the opportunity to get training directly at the Sabiha Gökçen Campus. The students who study here can enter their classes on this campus and can also work as assistant personnels at the airport's rush hour. They can work part-time. This brings such a kind of advantage that when a student finishes his two-year vocational training, he also gains sectoral experience. When these students graduate and try to find a job, they already know the sectors very well. And besides this, companies also know the students. They are really two steps ahead of other graduates, both in education and in business. Sabiha Gökçen Campus is located near the Istanbul Technopark, opened in partnership with the Defense Industry and Istanbul Chamber of Commerce.

Our next target in Istanbul is to have our students in Technopark. This means that we will get in touch with the companies in Technopark and companies there in order to locate our students as basic staff in Technopark and the companies conducting researches. By putting students there in order to learn the qualifications of the elements they will need in future and to ensure that our students will see developments of these sectors, especially the future of the aviation sector.

In 2018-2019 academic year, we will start the education with the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences. This will be our first one. But, at the moment, we do not intend to open the Business Administration and Economics Programs of this faculty. Our main focus is to open programs related to political sciences. In the first year we will open the Political Sciences and Public Administration, and Political Sciences and International Relations departments. Our aim here is to train regional specialists. In order to support this faculty, we plan to open the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences to follow. Under the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, there will also be programs for regional languages in the first place. In other words, we planned departments such as Arabic Translation and Interpreting, Persian Translation and Interpreting, Russian Translation and Interpreting or Arabic Language and Literature, Russian Language and Literature. Besides this, Department of History will also be opened. We believe that these two faculties will create a synergy. These are the first two faculties we will open in the first five years. The Faculty of Applied Sciences will be opened next to them starting this year. Under the Faculty of Applied Sciences we have departments that we think we can develop and improve with our experience in Cappadocia Vocational College.

Two of these are about aircraft technicians. One is Aircraft Body Engine Department and the other is Aircraft Electronics Department. These departments can be considered as the developed versions of the two-year associate programs in our vocational college. If there are those interested in aviation, there will be a department to educate b-type technicians. Our third program in applied sciences is the Department of Culinary Arts and Gastronomy. This is again a version of transferring our experience at Cappadocia Vocational College. Then, the graduate college that we will open up will be the graduate college of Health Sciences. We will start this graduate college with three programs within this year and we will make it bigger.. Graduate College of Health Sciences will be a school to be moved to the Nevşehir Central Campus. The third faculty is the Faculty of Architecture and Design. It will come after the other two. We have an Architectural Restoration Associate Program in our Vocational College. This is the program we have been inspired by to start this faculty. Cappadocia Region is a natural laboratory. It is a place where there is a lack of staff and a lot of opportunity to experience and practice especially in the area of restoration. So is our town. We established the Department of Architecture, which will be opened under the Faculty of Architecture and Design, for this purpose. Firstly, we will start with architecture education in our faculty. Then we want to move on to the fields of restoration in the master's and PhD programs. As a university we give importance to research centers. We are working both for the development of Turkey in general and specificly our own region. I would like to mention about two of these research centers. First one is the Hot Air Balloon and Airship Research Center. This center is carrying out some studies about the hot air balloons that Cappadocia Region is very famous for. The most important study is the Slot Service Center.

The Slot Service Center is operated under this center and works for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In Nevşehir airspace, it mainly controls balloon slots in the air field, collects data and shares this data with the General Directorate of Civil Aviation. It performs such a service. Our Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Research Center, is the first and only research center in its field in Turkey. This is the center under which we are making a software development for the monitoring and administration of permissions and the flight recording of unmanned aerial vehicles in Turkey together with the General Directorate of Civil Aviation. The main goal of our center in middle-run is to produce unmanned aerial vehicles. We are also carrying thi out with the support of our teaching staff in the aviation technician program and other aviation programs in our college. Cappadocia Region, where our campus is located, is a region in the middle of Central Anatolia. But there is an important difference when you compare it with the neighboring provinces: Cappadocia is a region where cultural and sports activities are very rich. At the same time, it is a region that houses people coming from many nations. It is a region with a lot of foreigners and attracting great numbers of tourists, and cultural tourism is very intense. Therefore, the students who come to study in Cappadocia, apart from getting a highly qualified training, directly get involved in a different atmosphere, it doesn't matter whether they come from a big city or a small town. A multicultural and diverse environment with a wide range of activities. In this environment, our students can take part in sports activities that they are not used to. For example, they can ride horses. Cappadocia Vocational College has the Equine Studies Associate Program. They can participate in the activities of this program. They can learn horse riding. They can ski on the Erciyes Mountain . They can join the zumba classes in the college. These activities are very important for us. We consider our programs as follows: the University of Cappadocia plans a variety of activities to enrich the higher education life of the students, besides providing a good education. Students who will graduate from us need to get an activity score beside their lecture grades. We also offer various opportunities for students to accumulate this activity ratings. There is the obligation of our teachers to perform a certain number of activities in their departments. This is a system we have been developing since 2011 at the vocational college. Each program organizes seminars, conferences, panels to deepen and enrich their own training.

Besides, there are activities organized by the Culture and Sports Department. When all those activities are combined, the university offers a satisfying higher education experience both in terms of education and cultural or sporting activity richness. I wish all the candidate students of universities to be successful this year.