Who we are

Director’s Message

tuna_dagli

Welcome to Koç University Career Development Center!

As a department which was founded in 2010, I am proud to mention that Career Development Center has reached a technical and organizational infrastructure that is providing myriad of career services for all students and young alumni.

Our mission for all students and young alumni is;

  • Providing them the support to identify and decide on career options that are matching with their interests, skills, abilities, needs and values
  • Equipping them with career related knowledge and skills on their journey, and preparing them for their chosen career paths
  • Increasing their employability potentials in local and global renowned employers
  • Supporting them while building a foundation for high-satisfaction careers

 

In order to achieve this mission, we have first developed an approach to career development, i.e. E.D.I.T. Your Career (Explore.Design.Improve.Transfer.) The approach has 4 non-linear and not necessarily consecutive steps. We have developed and will continue to improve all of our services revolving around this approach. This approach aims to support students to explore external career options and discover more about themselves, to design their careers step by step, to improve their processes and decisions using their inferences from experiences and to transfer these inferences and learned skills to their future lives and careers.

Starting as of 2016-2017 academic year, we have included “Start Your Career Today” Seminar, which is a mandatory seminar within UNIV 101 course. With this initiative, we aim at our undergraduate students having enhanced awareness regarding career concept, which steps do they need to take and how our center can support them during their university life and further.

We are providing Career Counseling service with a team of 10+ years business/academic experience. With this service, we are supporting various needs of our counselees, ranging from choice of field, job, sector or even organization, to CV and cover letter review and interview preparation.

We have grouped our career events, corresponding to the needs of each department and enabling our students to focus on sectors and fields of their interests in a more conscious way. From Science, R&D and Engineering to History, Culture and Arts, from Information Technologies to Communication, Media and Advertising, from Law to Health Care, our “Careers in …” Events are actualized with the collaboration of our student clubs. During these events, with the participation and cooperation of organizations, info sessions, mock interviews, case studies and site visits take place.

Moreover, we have identified 3 main titles of seminars to serve various needs of our students and young alumni. “Career Readiness” and “Advance in Your Profession” Seminars, aims at addressing to improve their social, communicational and professional knowledge and skills, empowering them to be more attractive to employers. The contents of the seminars are shaped with the feedback from students and employers. With “Outliers” Seminar, we would like our audience to feel inspired with extraordinary and miscellaneous career stories.

We do care about our collaborations with Employers. We are very happy to be in collaboration with organizations that prefer to compensate their human resources needs with Koç University students and alumni, while promoting their employer brands in our university. We provide opportunities for employers publishing their internship / job ads free of charge, joining our career events to introduce their organizations, hosting us in their offices and get more familiar with our student profile through case studies and mock interviews.  Our Employer Relations team is enthusiastic about developing relations with current employers and establishing relations with new employers.

In order to better serve our students and alumni, we aim to maintain and further improve our communication and collaboration with our Faculty, Institutes and related Administrative Departments.

Families are one of our key stakeholders. We consider that our students’ families play a very important role during their self-discoveries and exploring career options, by giving constructive feedback, being supportive, and guiding them to the right sources of information, internship and job opportunities. We do believe that they are being familiar with our services and encouraging their students to better utilize our services would be beneficial. We also encourage families to provide internship and/or job opportunities to our students and alumni in the organizations they work for or they own.

I would like to encourage all of our students, alumni and employers that we have collaborations with, to utilize our services in the best and most possible way. Last but not least, I kindly request the continuation of the sincere contribution of the faculties, institutes, administrative departments and families to the career development process of our students and alumni.

 

Tuna Dağlı

Director | Career Development Center