Thursday, June 5, 2008 Bogazici University and Sevket Pamuk

Today we went to Bogazici University and met Sevket Pamuk. Yes, the older brother of Orhan Pamuk, the famous, or rather should I say, infamous, author.

Here's Sevket Pamuk...I don't have any other better pictures of him I'm sorry to say, but I wish I did. You may be able to find better photos on the blogs of the other people of the group...

We discussed economics in Turkiye. Professor Pamuk gave us a sheet with a table showing the economic and human development indicators for Turkiye between the years of 1913 to 2005. The talk was interesting but for some reason the only way I could keep my eyes open was to take notes the entire time the man was talking so I now have 4 pages of notes on the things he said.

There was something interesting that he mentioned that made me happy because it tied back to something I'd discussed in my freshman seminar class last semester. Professor Pamuk mentioned that income in Turkiye had increased about six times since 1913 meaning that the average person can now spend six times as much. But then he also mentioned that although the income has increased, so have the options that consumers have, and so there is no clear definition of an increase or betterment in the lives of these consumers. This was something I had had a discussion about in my freshman seminar last semester after we read an article titled "Middle Class" where the author was talking about the middle class and consumerism and it was a really good article in that it showed just how hard it is to really define the middle class and to quantify it because there are a lot of things that change and can influence this definition. So yeah, I was really excited that I could draw a connection between something I'd done last semester and during this summer.

Bogazici University's campus was really beautiful. It's up above and looks down on the Marmara Sea, and it's in a more green neighborhood of Istanbul, so it kind of reminded me of home, but I just wasn't able to warm up to the university as much as I had to Sabanci University. Maybe it was because there weren't any students to take us around the campus and show us what happened and whatnot, but it just didn't seem to attract me as much as Sabanci had. Nor was it as appealing to me as UNC is, soooo I'm thinking I'll be staying at UNC and not transferring :D