To celebrate the 20th year of our university, we have prepared a set of four questions to ask faculty and administrative personnel who have been with us since the beginning, and to our first students. They all tell "the story of 20 years" from their own perspectives.
Going in alphabetical order, this week's interviewee for "The Story of 20 Years" is Ömür Kula Çapan.
Ömür Kula Çapan has been a member of the Sabancı University family for 21 years. She is one of the first 251 undergraduate students of 1999, when the university opened its doors. Ömür Kula Çapan, who graduated from the Economics Program, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) in 2003, is also one of the first undergraduate graduates of the university. She completed her Master's studies in Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design (VAVCD) program at FASS in 2005.
Ömür Kula Çapan, who started her business life after getting her Master's Degree, has a successful career in advertising. After working in leading companies such as RPM/Radar, Medina Turgul DDB, she was a member of the founding team of Finansbank Enpara.com and designed the brand, the product, the service, and the culture of the company. She established the Turkey office of R/GA, one of the most innovative companies in the world. Ömür Kula Çapan, who provides design and strategy services to giant companies such as Akbank, Turkcell, Kale Holding with her team, is currently collaborating with Turkey's leading brands in ares varying from strategy to design with an innovative business model at her own company, Primer Brand and Design Consulting.
Ömür Kula Çapan, a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Advertisers, has also been the President of the Foundation of Advertisers since 2019. In addition to professional organizations, she is a Board Member of the Education Reform Initiative (ERI) and serves on the Communications Committee of the SEV Foundation. Ömür Kula Çapan was also the first President of Sabancı University Alumni Association (SÜMED), which was formed after the graduation of the first undergraduate students in 2003.
Ömür Kula Çapan’s answers to our four questions are below.
What was your initial memory / impression of when you met Sabancı University for the first time?
Ö.K.Ç: I think I have nothing more than memories. But let me tell you one of my favorites. I think that is also my most famous memory. I always tell it.
Actually, there is a love story behind my meeting with Sabancı University. My whole plan was to study in Istanbul because I was very much in love and he was in Istanbul, and we would finally be in the same city and be together - in my mind. I was going to the Boğaziçi University, for sure. Everything was going to be beautiful. However, Sabancı University, one of my first three choices due to my father's insistence that I would win a scholarship and the fact that he thought Sabancı University was safe (!) because it was far enough from Istanbul (!), was above the Economics Program of Boğaziçi University, and all my plans were turned upside down overnight. I was never happy to get into this school, I cried for days. If you think about the location of the Sabancı campus and the roads that led to it 20 years ago, I was not actually studying in Istanbul. And, of course, we were not together again. Adding other reasons...
Even worse was the commute problem I encountered when I started the school. Among the first-year students of Sabancı University, there was no one who needed to go to the city center as terribly as me. Because the love story in question was about to end so badly, and I urgently needed to go to the city center and talk to him before he got on a plane and leave.
In our campus, where the municipal bus did not pass and taxis came from İzmit, one night a historical e-mail titled “Shuttle Shuttle Shuttle” was going around; I was the one who sent that first e-mail. Because I had to go to the city center the following day, and I would set up a system for that if I had to.
It was dear Mr. Terzioğlu, who brought this school into existence and who told me to go and do what I had to do, and it was his door, which was always wide open, that I burst through crying with love pang. I cried out, “Are we prisoners here? Why have you not thought about shuttles!” He said, “You are absolutely right, immediately go and figure out how many people would use it, which destinations they would want, what time they would use it, make a schedule, I am setting it up tomorrow,” and as I if he had read my soul, “You will fall in love, you will cut class, you will go to the city center. How can we not have shuttles? You are right, we could not think of that.”
That was how I actually met Sabancı University for the first time. That was the first day I realized that I was in the nest of minds and wisdom that understood me, that would be there for me, that would provide me with opportunities. During the 6 years I studied there, again thanks to the founding team, I was never wrong.
What are the differences between yourself 20 years ago and yourself today, and how did Sabancı University contribute to that change?
Ö.K.Ç: I can write for pages and pages. But first, I have to say that this is the place that made me love organizations, love the school. I used to think that in an education system where I believed everyone was dishonest and pretty mediocre, we were all decent people -not even quite that decent- thanks only to very few self-sacrificing teachers. In Sabancı, I met people who were not only competent in their job, but also had a great heart, mind, and morality. I have known people who have become giants with their careers and characters, from administrators to professors, dorm attendants, construction workers. I found myself in a culture where rotten apples were immediately separated, but not due to differences of opinion, but differences of character, where everyone had to behave with certain virtues, and I joined with admiration like everyone else. Being like them, taking it further became my greatest ambition in life. Today, I am still trying to maintain a life and career where I can be worthy of Tosun Terzioğlu, Hüsnü Paçacıoğlu, Zerrin Koyunsağan, Gülçin Atarer, Tara Hopkins - I could go on-. I owe a lot to this school that gave me this compass. Besides, if I had really gone to Boğaziçi University, maybe I would have had a very good life and career again, but I do not know if I could have found my own values that I have today, which are distinct with their nuances and sharpness. If I had not known and observed Halil Berktay, İzak Atiyas, Alev Topuzoğlu, Albert Erkip, Ayşe Kadıoğlu, Hasan Bülent Kahraman, Zehra Sayers, Mehmet Ali Alpar, and Ahmet Evin, if I had not heard the words “You will establish this school from scratch”, beginning, if I had not had the opportunity to carry the motto of creating and developing together to most remote corners of Anatolia, I would not have known myself or this country or this life. If I have been able to make endless decisions in these 20 years, and each of them contained common themes despite all the risks, it means that I have realized that I know a thing or two, and that standing out is possible with knowledge and hard work combined with virtue.
I believe that there can be nothing greater that a school can give to a person. This school has allowed us all to find our own light, by setting countless perfect examples for us, teaching us to separate the one that is not clean, and encouraging us to take risks that make us grow.
What comes into your mind when you think of Sabancı University in 20 years? What are your dreams for Sabancı University for the next 20 years? What about yourself?
Ö.K.Ç: This school has always been a quiet and humble oracle to me. When I think about Sabancı University and the years I spent here, what we did, what we talked about, the opportunities provided to us, I realize that how progressive the aspects that were given to us were, and how this school get them in our blood without making a big noise, as it should be. I have always been ahead in life. For me, this school has turned it into a habit and an internal dynamo, a constant ability to predict. I dream that my school will continue to create the future. I have dreams of one day spreading the culture of this school even further. I used to dream of being Mr. Paçacıoğlu. Joke aside, I think that the culture created in our time is a formula that will be a solution to many social and economic dead ends of today. So it is my dream to protect it if it is necessary, but to expand and deepen it further. I always consider myself an active part of this school as well, wherever I am in my career.
Where and how would you be now if your paths hadn't crossed with Sabancı University?
Ö.K.Ç: I am sure that I would have a copy and paste resume, a marriage with someone close to the average of my profile, a far-fetched smile, in short, a very boring life. By the time I finished high school, I was very smart, very successful, but as a different and difficult person, I was already at a crossroads with my own mess and knots. If I had not joined Sabancı University, I could easily have stumbled, settled down quickly, disappeared in shallow ambitions, and taken chosen paths. I found power in realizing that I was not complicated at all in the areas that this school opened up for me, and this power gave me the ability to transform everything that I touch and make them “mine”. If I had studied in another school, I would have been the product of that school. However, I am not. I am grateful to my father for not missing this opportunity - it was a sad but necessary love story, and I am always grateful to him.