Awaiting an Interesting Summer

As a junior, this upcoming summer is my last high school summer and I wanted to make the most out of it both by taking part in activities that would help me grow and spending time with my loved ones. Therefore, I have spent some time in the past month on the lookout for cool programs I can participate in during the summer and applying to them. April was the month I heard back from them.

I am so happy to let you know I have finalized my enrollment with a full scholarship in two programs I was interested in. As an international student sometimes it can get quite complicated to manage applications and scholarship processes but I am proud of myself that I was able to navigate the process this year with success.

So what are the two programs I am talking about? I will start off my summer with the Pioneer Academics Summer Research Program in which I will participate in online sessions while I do research in computational physics with the guidance of a mentor. Afterward, I will visit the University of Chicago for one week for the Emerging World Leaders program where I will get to meet many other like-minded individuals for a better world and we will learn about a wide range of topics from STEM to humanities together.

These are only some of the plans I will be putting into action this summer and I am so excited for what is yet to come. Tune in to the upcoming Silk Scrolls to see how I spend my summer!

My Last Children’s Day

23rd of April: National Sovereignty and Children's Day… It is a day of resilience and future in Turkiye. It signifies the day our national parliament was established in the middle of turmoil but is also gifted to children by our visionary leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. “Why?” you may ask. Because children are our future, what we teach and how we foster the growth of the younger generations becomes the reality of the time when they become adults.

It might be my favorite national holiday with colorful celebrations, chaotically prepared school performances, and cheerful parades. But as time went by I came to understand the profound meaning of this day. Teaching kids peace is the only way to keep peace. As Atatürk has once said, “Peace at Home, Peace in the World” should be how we view our future.

Therefore, I believe this is a national holiday that calls for international understanding and it gives me joy to see that the celebration of children is a practice present in many other nations all over the world. Additionally, it is customary to have celebrations like a festival with children from all over the world learning about each other’s cultures and presenting their own in Ankara, the capital of Turkiye. If you are curious about this lively festival, here is how it went this year.

This year the Children’s Day was even more special to me since it was the last time I was celebrating it as a child while being the first time I was celebrating it abroad. A few years ago I wouldn’t have been able to imagine how privileged I am today to be in Costa Rica with students from all over the world. I believe the rich diversity of the UWCs and its mission for peace, resonates deeply with why we celebrate children. Ultimately, wherever you are in the world, I call upon you to take a moment to appreciate the key children hold for a peaceful future.

Shooting for the Moon

Sometimes innovation comes from attempting what seems impossible at first sight. Humanity took its first step at the moon because some people were courageous enough to try and shoot for the moon. This is the principle behind moonshots, almost prophetic projects where you need to think outside the box to see what developments are awaiting us in the upcoming 5-10 years. To see actual moonshots from pros check out X, the moonshot factory.

For the past few weeks my partner and I have been working together on a moonshot of ours which we will eventually present to the Knowledge Society (TKS). Eco-Extractor is the result of us endlessly brainstorming how to solve a problem we both hate: food waste. The co-existence of food waste and food scarcity or lack of nutrition even when people have access to food was bothering us and we started looking into how we can reduce food waste in a convenient manner.

Eco-Extractor aims to reduce food waste by rewriting the one-way food waste management chain. Big ideas come with big complications and as we are approaching our first big pitch to TKS we are tackling different aspects of this problem from waste sorting to food safety through research and creative thinking. I am so excited to keep you updated on the complete 1st iteration of Eco-Extractor and recommend you to keep an eye on my Medium for the upcoming article on the “how”s and “why”s of it.

On the Word: Waste

By simple definition, waste is something we discard; or see unworthy of our attention, time, or money. The concept of waste boils down to how much resources we are willing to spare on something. 

This year for English class, we have read the book Unica Looking at the Sea. It is a book by the Costa Rican author Fernando Contreras Castro that questions what we define as trash. The book carries many societal and environmental criticisms. I would definitely recommend it! Without any spoilers, I would like to highlight an idea from the book. We only call things trash because we find no use for them. In the book we see the lives of the residents of the Rio Azul dump, making a life for themselves from seemingly nothing.

Honestly, this concept is not new. The saying “One man’s trash is another’s treasure,” has been around for a while. I think all these ideas can be reconciled to say we waste things because we don’t spare the effort to salvage them. We waste luxuries in our lives from time to water. But in reality, those luxuries are necessities we are not aware of the value of yet.

So why continue wasting so much in our lives?

Check these out:

You have reached the end of this scroll, check out these before reading the next one.

• If you like animations and learning about history, Historically is an amazing channel. This is their latest video on the philosopher Nietzsche and his life.

• I find game theory to be one of the most interesting concepts in mathematics. Presenting; What Game Theory Reveals About Life, The Universe, and Everything by Veritasium.

• Data collected over the years can tell us a lot about how society has changed itself and the individuals in it. In this video, you follow teenagers in a dataset as they grow.

Education as a Force This Time Brings Us Together

Last month I had one of the most impactful experiences of my life so far. When I was applying to UWC to be a student I have never thought my involvement in this movement would one day lead me to represent my campus and my country in the UWC International Congress in Thailand. I am so honored that my fellow students have trusted me with this responsibility and I am proud to say I made the most out of this unique experience.

During the congress we had several breakout sessions where we got to discuss the future of international education. In these breakout sessions it was really valuable to hear the perspectives from so many people with different roles in the movement from heads of school to national committee directors. It was also really important to me that I was able to get across a student perspective in issues such as adaptablity of current IB education, student agency on a residential campuses and many more.

We also had plenary sessions with the participation of the all delegation. These sessions once again made me remember the huge scope and mission of the UWC community. The first and the last plenary sessions were one of the most notable ones for me. We actually had the very first plenary session online a few months back and I was one of the panel speakers talking about UWC Costa Rica. It was an exciting beginning to this months long process of planning and working for the best conference experience ever.

In the picture above you see some of the incredible people I worked with, which brings me to why the closing plenary session was particularly exciting. Prior to and during the Congress, the student delegates representing 18 UWCs from all over the Globe worked together on the launch of the Internationa Student Group the increase interconnectedness between the schools within the movement from a student perspective and we got to present our project to the rest of the guests during the closing plenary session.

Overall, this was one of the most memorable experiences of my life, packed to the brim with amazing people and connections alongside a refreshed faith in the power of education. My hope and goal is to keep this spirit alive on our campus as well!

Learnings From a Challenge-Turned Hackathon

This month we had the TKS Spring Challenge during which my teammate and I worked together in developing an idea and a pitch deck on it for the World Economic Forum with a focus on global issues education utilizing educational technology.

This experience have thought me a lot from teamwork to time management. Especially from the last 72 hours where the challenge slowly evolved into an hackathon. Here are a few takeaways:

• Don’t get overly attached to ideas without solid backing: This is really important because attachement can cloud judgement. Without clearly writing down an idea and finding clear reasoning as to why it is important through actual data points is a recipe for disaster.

• Ask for feedback: It is very very important to utilize the expertize of people around you. If you can get feedback from a fresh pair of eyes on the pitch you have been staring for days preparing, get it. It is going to be much more receptive to potential faults.

• Work with people that are willing to put in the effort and be one: My experience with my amazing partner and what I have observed from some other teams with successful ideas have made it clear that you have the highest chance of success if both you and the people you work together are responsible. Responsibility comes in two forms: pulling your weight to make things get done or communicating clearly when you are not able to follow through on a task so the team can adapt.

With all that being said, you may be curious as to what we worked on. Our idea, ClimaEd, utilizes the curiosity of youth to encourage learning about environment and climate change related issues. The platform that would be integrated to currently existing WEF website structure, serves as a tool for elementary school teachers and parents to introduce these crucial topics to their kids. ClimaEd is a set of visual scavenger hunts that is designed to consist of hotspots on a scene where kids can explore around to access more resources such as easy to read articles, interactive maps or more relevant scavenger hunts for an engaging learning experience.

End of an Age of Firsts

March 25th marks my birthday and this year I turned from an age that had so many songs written about it to another with the same attribute, now I am 17!

So why was 16 an age of many firsts? I think this closely corraltes to both me becoming more confident to leave my comfort zone and the society seeing 16 as an “landmark birthday.”

16 is one of the age limits in cinema advisories, the limit for driving in some countries (unfortunately not in Turkiye or Costa Rica), and even the age you can start to get a job in some cases. We as a society have deemed 16 an important passage into the looming adulthood at 18 and I believe I made the most out of that age.

Getting into and starting UWC, leaving my family and country for an extended period of time, attending to the Rise Residential Summit, travelling and seeing more places than I have done ever before, starting a newsletter, getting into building more independent projects, taking my first set of APs, having to do my own laundry and many other chores, living with English as my main language of communication, figuring out the bus system in Costa Rica… Big or small, the age 16 brought me so many firsts and many priceless experiences. I am exteremely grateful for all the people I had around me through the hard and the good of my past age.

And my new age started with another first: my first birthday celebration away from home… Honestly, it is very bittersweet. While I have always dreamed about the good parts of my experience here as an international student, I guess no one prepares you for that feeling. It is almost as if your birthday is saying “You are grown now, look at you celebrating your birthday with your friends.” Nevertheless, I am happy to take a look back on my last year and how I started off this one and I cannot help but be extremely curious what this new age will bring to me.

On the Word: Learning

While there is a science to learning and cognitive scientists trying to learn we learn (see what I did there, pun fully intended), I may not be the most qualified person to be talking about learning. But after all, I am a student with a few words to share. Learning and education go hand in hand and education is pretty straightforward at first glance, you get introduced to different concepts that usually aim to help you navigate life. 

Considering this, what intrigues me the most is self-education. We live in a time where information is incredibly easy to access and absorbing all that knowledge is possible by sitting in front of a silly mechanism called a computer and connecting to this funny thing called the internet. While access to these is still a privilege in and out of itself, it is still much more accessible than it used to be. I believe when we have the collective knowledge of humanity to our pleasure, self-education becomes even more crucial because it is about what we make out of this privilege.

This made me take a look at what I was doing with my privilege to learn. For the past few months, I have been working on learning and replicating in the field of autonomous aerial vehicles. There have been tough moments that really demotivated me so I decided to take a step back and look into why I was doing it in the first place. I decided to work on projects and research in this area because I was curious about it.  Well, did coming to this realization help me magically solve my struggles? No. But it gave me a new boost of motivation as I navigated the struggles of self-learning. 

All in all, what I wanted to say is that I believe the strongest learning is self-driven by curiosity and genuine interest. If you think you have these two prerequisites for a topic, why not try teaching it to yourself?

Check these out:

You have reached the end of this scroll, check out these before reading the next one.

• Summer vacation season is creeping and the choice between an Airbnb vs. a hotel persists. See “Why Airbnb Fails to Disrupt the Hotel Industry?”

• As you may know, I live in Costa Rica so imagine my surprise when I learned EHang’s pilotless eVTOL had its debut flight in Latin America in Costa Rica. Learn more about it in this article.

• Remember Neauralink announcing its first human patient recently? Well, we have updates!

Bonus recommendation: If you have 10 minutes of free time this month, I definitely recommend you give GRUFF by Righteous Robot a watch. This short film created by literally one person has a simple yet very emotional story. I have seen on YouTube the thoughfullness of the creator throughout the making of this project and it was really interesting to see the innovation of this untraditional animation medium.

Learning from Malekus

When I was applying to UWC —my current high school— one thing the school offered out of many got my attention and was the push I needed to apply: Community Action Week aka. CAW. The concept of this week is that every single student on campus takes a break from classes for one week and joins a residential volunteering project that aims to help out communities across the nation. I was so excited while I was waiting for our CAW project assignments. When I got that email saying I was in the group that was going to Rancho Tojijifuru, I was happy I got into one of my top choices but I also didn’t know what to expect. Rancho Tojijifuru is the Malekus’ indigenous territory, it is a space where they fight to keep their language and culture alive as well as teach outsiders like us about their rich history and the connection they have to their traditions. That one week outside the classroom could be the week I learned the most in because the experiences and the dialogues we had weren’t things you would find in a textbook.

We spent most of our time there painting the community school and by the end of the week seeing the school with its brand new look and the students studying in the classrooms we just painted was really nice, it felt like I helped make a change for the better. We also got the chance to visit the land Malekus just recovered after their legal fight and we helped the reforestation of it. While we contributed to the community in the mornings, we spent the evenings learning from them.

Malekus are artisanal people, learning what the forest and their art mean to them was quite powerful. It also made me feel hope about the future to see a community being so close to its roots and living sustainably even through the challenges of today.

As an ending note, please appreciate the incredible diversity we humans have. Throughout the years we lost so much knowledge and processes of the collective human heritage, so, let’s each do our best not to lose what we have today and be open to learning from indigenous communities.

Celebrating Culture in Hard Times

This month, we had Middle East and North Africa (MENA) cultural week. Even though our region is going through incredibly hard times, we wanted to share the beauty and diversity of our culture as well as start impactful dialogues in our school community. We had workshops where we taught people different alphabets used in the region, had a food fair where the school community got to experience different tastes, talked about some cultural elements from each of our respective countries, hosted a panel on the history of the ongoing conflict, and ended the week on a lighthearted note with the cultural show we put together with a twist.

Out of respect to my fellow students who were directly impacted by the conflict, I wasn’t part of the panel and wanted to leave that space we sometimes desperately need for them. However, being an attendee and seeing the student body come together to understand and emphasize was very powerful. It once again made me believe in the benevolence of humanity.

We wanted to balance the difficult discussions with entertaining learning and one of the activities for that was our cultural show. The twist I mentioned was that the whole show was structured as a wedding. If you know, you know, MENA weddings can get crazy with all the dancing and everything happening all at once, so, we combined our traditional dances with a series of skits. Working together on this project was very nice and embracing our cultures together was a memorable experience.

One of the talks we had about cultural elements was about religion and architecture in Turkiye. I wanted to share some of the information slides I prepared for it if you are curious to learn about a few of the many cool buildings in Turkiye.

Trying Not to Get Bombed in MUN

Ah, the world of Model United Nations… Maybe it is the only institution in this world where even crazier stuff than the UN can happen. Similar to how the UN operates, MUN also has committees and I chose to be in COPUOS (Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space). Also in MUN instead of representing the country you are from, you represent a country that is assigned to you. For me, it was Japan this time. Even though I have a good amount of experience as a debater, this was the first as a delegation in an MUN conference I attended outside my school and I think it was a pretty good learning experience. There is one highlight I want to share.

When we were going through our discussions as usual, there was an outside crisis introduced to the committee: Japan made hostile alien contact in Okinawa. The way crises worked in the committee meant I had no previous knowledge that this would be happening. When the crisis was introduced, the first instinct of almost the whole committee was to nuke or bomb my precious island. Things were not looking good. But what happened in the end? None of the blocks that were formed suggested to take violent action. You might ask how this happened, and that is the fun part about MUN. With enough speech power and strategic planning between blocks, it is actually pretty plausible to shape both blocks to your interest. Additionally, in this specific case, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) being a substantial actor in the international scene was helpful to me in my negotiations. I guess the moral of the story is even when things look impossible, there is almost always a back door. This doesn’t only apply to MUN but also to many other opportunities we face during our lives.

On the Word: Success

Depending on the stage of life one is at the definition of success changes vastly. We all go through that evolution during our lives and it doesn’t come as a surprise. When you are little you are read a little faster than the average and you are instantly a genius and make your family proud. As you age, the expectations and the stakes go higher. You now have many more classes to juggle and god forbid if you don’t get straight As you are a failure. However, school and grades are not the metrics as time continues to fly by. People start judging you based on your job, your salary, and even your love life.

But is your success up for others to define?

I feel like the way we perceive success in society is quite limited. I am also guilty of subjecting myself to this one-size-fits-all definition of success. There are advantages to that mindset as the conventional metrics of success are based on security within the society we live in. If you are “successful,” you most likely are secure. However, it is draining. No one will ever perfectly replicate the life path of another. So there is no way to define their success with the same set of rules. Let’s come back to school example: one person might be getting straight As and have a very good support network helping them study and develop as a person, the other person has some Bs and Cs, they work very hard, but has limited support and is their own mentor. I would argue the second person is very very successful even though from the eyes of society the first person is the star student.

All in all, I believe it is time we start seeing success as something relative and dynamic rather than absolute and static.

Check these out:

You have reached the end of this scroll, check out these before reading the next one.

• Japan is hollowing out a mountain. Whaat? Why? It is not some crazy story plot, it is for science. Check out this video explaining it.

• If you may be wondering why I am publishing the February newsletter in the middle of March, well it is about time management. This month I had so much to talk about and prioritizing what I wanted to highlight sent me down a perfection procrastination path. Watching this amazing TED-Ed video changed my perspective on that. You sometimes just need to get stuff done, not lose time thinking about what is the best order to do so.

• I love video essays and I love animation. One of my favorite movies recently is Spiderman Across the Spider-Verse. While there is so much to talk about in this movie, here is a video essay on Hobie Brown that opened my eyes to so many details that I missed on my first watch.

Taking a Look at Sustainability through Coffee

This month I visited El Toledo Coffee Farm to talked with the family members running the farm. It was really interesting to learn about how coffee is actually one of the crops with the lowest yield not because it is not efficient but because we just use a very limited portion of it. We start with coffee fruit which we only take the bean, then the beans are washed and reduced, and then they are roasted reducing their mass even further. After all that effort and processing, what we end up with is a product that has no nutritional value. Yes, we all love good coffee, but you may have noticed a good coffee for many people is not black coffee by itself but rather a milk and sugar-added version of it. So, do we really like the coffee?

In the photograph, you can see four different coffee cups but the rightmost one doesn’t look like coffee. It is because that is coffee tea made of dried coffee fruit. When we tried three different roasts and the coffee tea the majority of our group enjoyed the tea most. And most surprisingly, if you like to drink coffee for the caffeine, I have news for you: coffee tea has more caffeine in it. 

As you enjoy the beautiful sights from the farm, I want to just highlight sustainability can come in many shapes and forms. A small action towards supporting sustainable agriculture might be through your morning drink.

What do We Call a Camp?

Every year there is one event that all the IB1s in UWC Costa Rica hear about and wonder how is it going to go. This phenomenon is called the Firstie Camp. When I heard the word camp, I wasn’t really sure what to expect because that word has been previously used for events that weren’t camps by the traditional definition. However, I can say after experiencing firstie camp, it was pretty close to being a camp in the traditional sense. It was pretty nice to bond with new people from my generation and spend time with my friends. Alongside the intended purpose of the camp, two things happened that impacted me. The first is that I had an unintentional phone detox. Not having or having very choppy service and data on the campsite allowed me to get off my phone and see how much time I was wasting doom-scrolling away. Coming back from the camp I have been more mindful about my phone usage. Another thing is that I have noticed how caffeine-dependent I have become. We like to joke how the IB triangle of good grades, social life, and sleep cannot co-exist but I have come to realize I was at a point where I couldn’t wake up without drinking a cup of coffee. When we returned from the camp, I deliberately stopped drinking coffee. At first, it was annoying because I was sleeping way more than I used to and losing time but then I noticed how much my energy levels had changed. Nowadays, I am being more intentional with what I consume and substitute coffee with tea.

Asian Cultural Week: Unlocking Cultures, Unleashing Stories

Maybe my favorite aspect of being a UWC student is the cultural weeks. Whether you are on the participating side or the audience, cultural weeks always mean so much fun and learning about different cultures. During the last week of January, we celebrated the Asian Cultural Week and as you may know, Asia is an incredibly diverse continent. The clothing, the food, and the songs all differ depending on where you take a look so it was a challenge to fit all that into a week of events. While the whole week was packed to the brim with the efforts of my fellow Asian students I want to share some highlights.

• Spicy challenge and my struggle with Buldak noodles: Asia is the land of spices, and as the school tradition goes, we took it to the extremes. While I was wise enough to not participate in the challenge itself, I was unfortunate enough to give the Buldak noodles that were used a chance. For future reference, do not eat spicy noodles that have four times the sauce it is supposed to.

  

• Cooking for the community: Everyone loves the food from their home but one thing I particularly like about Turkish cuisine is its diverse street food selection. While there are limitations on what I can and cannot cook, I set on the mission of making Çiğköfte with the motivation of being the only Turkish student on campus. I am happy to report that the rich spices but also the very simple flavor profile was a hit and during our Asian Food Court, many enjoyed this dish they had heard for the first time.

  

• More than a bunch of colors: In honor of the week, we had an early Holi which also happened to be my first one. It was really cool to learn about the story behind Holi and its significance. After learning about it, it was time to put our mini-festival into action. The whole community gathered with their colors and the event was such a beautiful experience bringing people together. In the classical teenager fashion, the festival evolved into a water fight but it was a good conclusion since the weather was super hot.

  

• Singing as a non-singer: An integral part of a cultural week is the cultural show concluding it. One unfortunate thing about our campus is that West Asia is not represented much in terms of the number of students, therefore, I knew I wanted to take the responsibility and do something for the cultural show. The problem is that I am not a performer when it comes to singing or dancing. After articulating it for a while I ended up deciding on singing an old folk song I used to really like. As I have said, I am not the best singer, but at least I put myself out there and experienced something new while I shared a piece of my culture with the others.

  

Overall, the week taught me a lot about other cultures and myself. I re-learned how to push myself out of my comfort zone through new experiences and I believe these events significantly contributed to my growth as a person.

On the Word: Family

This month I chose the word family to reflect on because I just left my family behind once again to see my other family. The December break was interesting since there was the idea of coming back involved as I have reflected upon in the previous scroll. However, leaving once again made me think of what we defined as a family. During a lifetime, we connect with many people. With some we become very close and hold onto them for the rest of our lives, with others the connections come and go. I think our families are the people we hold onto no matter what. My family is my family even though I am over on the other side of the world because we don’t let each other go. We talk about our lives on the phone and complain from time to time. We wait to be reunited but also know how to fight over mundane things when we are together. Family is hard to define but it is refreshing to know you can choose your family, the people you don’t want to let go, to some extent. This train of thought becomes relevant when I am on campus for a different reason as well. On campus, we call the regional groups families. For example, it was the Asian family who prepared the cultural week. While these are not families in the traditional sense, I think the usage of the word here captures the essence of it: the idea of coming together, and uniting with people whom you share so much with. All this to say, family is a word that will mean so many different things to different people but most importantly it brings us together.

Check These Out:

You have reached the end of this scroll, check out these before reading the next one.

• Learn about a new brain-computer interface Neuralink’s first human trial, as you may have already heard about from Twitter through Elon Musk the owner of the platform and the co-founder of Neuralink.

• Have you ever wondered How Is Shein Really Keeping Prices So Low? There are a lot of aspects to it but I was really surprised about how their website is utilized to understand customer behavior and trends.

• Controversial opinion but I like airplane food and was curious about the operation behind the tray of food I get on a plane, you can also take a peek at How Singapore Airlines Makes 50,000 In-Flight Meals A Day.

Working to Solve Real-World Problems

I firmly believe that our work is always a preparation for something bigger we will create. This also has reflected upon my journey in The Knowledge Society. Throughout the last few months, I learned new skills, adopted new mindsets, and honed my writing skills. All of this came in handy during the TKS Fall Challenge where my amazing team consisting of Sofie Khan (), Vinesh Kothari, Sinem Ünlü (), and I worked on improving the on-platform safety of minors using Meta products. From Instagram to Facebook the undeniable impact our time using Meta products had on us and our peers motivated us to work towards a safer platform.

In the sprint that lasted a little over two weeks, we built a standalone deck with our proposal to Meta which you can see below. This was also a huge learning opportunity for me to work on my skills from project management to preparing high-quality proposals. Here is a peek into our deck

Sending a Message in a Bottle

If you have been accompanying me for the November Scroll, you may remember my recommendation to send a message in a bottle to a faraway place, Europa. Also known as the icy moon of Jupiter, Europa has been one of the celestial bodies that piqued my interest the most.

I remember reading a comic when I was in elementary school in which a family visited Europa for their vacation and the kids were throwing around their theories on what could be under the ice. Maybe it was the impact of watching too many sci-fi movies but I joined them in imagining all sorts of crazy marine life hidden under the ice.

Are we going to discover a space kraken during Europa Clipper’s mission? Most likely not. But it still excites me to know that we will look at this cool but mysterious place to see if it has the conditions to support life.

There is a lot of interesting information about the mission as well as mission updates on: https://europa.nasa.gov/

Wrapping up a Semester

December marked the end of my first semester at UWC Costa Rica. This was a very valuable journey with its ups and downs, therefore, I see great value in sharing some of my insights from it.

• Don’t rely on expectations: Coming into my first semester I had a lot of speculations in my mind regarding what it was going to be like living on the other side of the world without my family and attending an international school. Many things I expected to be challenging were actually way easier to adjust while I was surprised by some aspects of my experience I didn’t foresee. While a certain amount of expectations are healthy in planning your future, you need to understand they most likely are not true and you need to embrace your journey not what you thought it would be.

• Do your research: Travelling and getting used to living in another country is inevitably quite stressful. Your go-to resources might come from your school or the institution you are joining but it is extremely valuable to do your own research about daily life. What is the transportation like? Which operator should I get a SIM card from? Where are some good places to study outside the campus? You will figure out the answers to these types of questions as time goes by but it doesn’t hurt to do your own research both online as well as asking around in your community.

• Reflect on your experience: Sometimes in the grand scheme of things we tend to forget how far we have come and how crazy each of our journeys are. Reflecting on your life and your experiences will be different for everyone. For me, it can range from jotting down something I have noticed about myself to rambling on a random voice recording about what my past week has been like. Overall, reflection on the events in your life helps put your growth and the changes you go through into perspective.

• Be a participant, not an observer: This last one is something I am still improving upon but have seen incredible benefits from. Being an observer is good and has its occasions, no shade to that. However, the way to do things is to see yourself as a participant in what is happening around you rather than a forever observer. A participant pushes themselves out of their comfort zone to gain experiences they couldn’t otherwise and I think that is not something to miss out on.

Coming Back Home

December wasn’t only the end of one semester but the start of my winter break during which I was lucky enough to be able to visit my home. By how you define home it may be that it is not impossible to come back home because it simply is where you are but I don’t think it is that black and white. I grew up in İstanbul, Turkiye my whole life until I left for UWC. The place this city holds in my heart and who I am is indescribable. Sometimes I customarily got mad at the traffic on my commute to school and complained about how crowded the city is but that doesn’t change the fact that I am forever grateful to have grown up in a city so beautifully full of life. What I can say from my experience is coming back to something you have left behind makes you appreciate a lot of the things you took for granted whether it be the time you spent with your family, the undiscovered tea gardens of the city, or taking a ferry to cross the Bosphorus. Maybe the biggest piece of mind I am taking back with me for the next semester is to truly appreciate the moment I am in.

Check These Out

You have reached the end of this scroll, check out these before reading the next one.

• UK Supreme Court rules that AI’s cannot patent their work. This once again raises the interesting conversation regarding intellectual rights in the age of AI.

• In the lovely season of Spotify Wrapped have you ever wondered “Why do you like your favorite songs?”

• As this is the last month of the year I want to finish up with what the Daily Stoic offers for the 31st of December: “Get Active in Your Own Rescue”

What If We All Lived 100 Years?

Sometimes I think about how much longer human life expectancy has gotten. In the graph below you can see how relatively quickly these advancements were made as well. Like many developments, this also had several factors like better healthcare and living standards but also less physical conflict like widespread wars.

With all those new years we can get closer to self-fulfillment and cherish more of our time here on this earth. I could argue time is the most valuable currency and now we have more than twice what we would have 100 years ago. The potential that comes with this is truly mind-blowing to me.

If we all were to live 100 years I want to believe we all would have more time to dedicate to the things we enjoy, whether it be working on innovations, creating unique artworks, or spending time with loved ones.

Therefore, it doesn’t surprise me that there is extensive research towards increasing human longevity and more importantly the health-span because we want those extra years to be healthy and enjoyable as well. If you want an introductory run-down I suggest you take a look at this thread.

Puntarenas & Making the Most Out of Everything

This month, I got to visit the Puntarenas province of Costa Rica on a school trip and it was absolutely amazing. The atmosphere and the ocean were charming but enjoying the scenery wasn’t the only thing I did while there, we visited Parque Marino del Pacifico. This place is not your average aquarium, while the diversity of sea life there was mind-blowing there are two other things I want to talk about.

One is how a good portion of animals there are rescued or surrendered animals. Thanks to the efforts of the park, different marine animals from turtles to sharks are living and rehabilitating there.

Another really cool aspect of the park is how they repurpose leftover materials from the dissection classes. During our visit there we got a class on microplastics which was followed by the dissection of a squid and a tuna. It was really interesting to learn more about these animals that are very commonly consumed but in the end, I was curious about what they were going to do with the fish we used. It turns out the squids are used to feed the manta rays and the tuna is used to feed the sharks that are in the park. This reminded me that the things we interact with and learn from usually don’t have a single use and I think it is really cool.

Becoming an Agent of Change

This month marked one of the most exciting events in my school! The Agents of Change camp is a program teaching us the principles of social entrepreneurship. One of the key philosophies of the program is to see yourself as an agent of change and it really resonated with me because I believe if we want to create an impact for the better we need to start believing that we can create that impact. Well, one might say this sounds cliche but it is really easy to forget your capability when society doesn’t do justice to the incredible stories around us.

As part of the camp, we had a sprint tackling a problem we saw around us. Being in an international school and seeing all of us come from very different backgrounds we delved into how we can create a platform in our community for peer support. In this photograph, you can see me and my amazing team working on our idea.

Trial and Error (Many of Them)

For the past month, I have been working on developing real-time gesture-tracking software for UAVs. This personal interest of mine emerged from learning about the potential uses of drones in disaster management. You can check out my YouTube Short on it if you are interested.

But what I want to highlight is my journey in developing this software. Disclaimer: it still is not working in real-time. While I was going through tutorials and looking up simulations to test my software in, I was going ahead of myself. Even though in my mind it was already smooth sailing, I had problems with the simplest of steps, using my webcam for real-time feed. The funny part is that I have worked with OpenCV and my webcam on the same device previously without any problems. However, having unexpected problems on a very simple step humbled me and made me remember why I really like coding. Coding makes me deal with problems I wouldn’t otherwise and pushes me to look for solutions in interesting ways. I will keep you updated with my demo for the code soon! So if you haven’t, follow me on Medium.

Check These Out

You have reached the end of this scroll, check out these before reading the next one.

• Chemistry 2023 Nobel Prize: What Are Quantum Dots?

• You should watch ​​The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What?

• Send Your Name in a Bottle to Europa (stay tuned for me to talk more about on the December scroll)

September

Starting A Year of Innovation

This year September marked me starting the Innovate Program of The Knowledge Society (TKS). My journey in TKS includes a truly exciting deep dive into entrepreneurship and innovation. By the time I am writing this newsletter, I am already significantly into the program and have started my individualized study in autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs), discovered the wonders of time blocking on your calendar, rebuilt how I present, and challenged my definition of success. Coming back to my interest in AAVs, have you ever thought about how they could help during natural disaster relief? Turns out their mobility and sensors make AAVs extremely good companions for disaster relief and humanitarian action. Read More

Peace Day but Make it an International School

As a first-year student at United World Colleges Costa Rica (UWCCR), I celebrated the 21st of September as UWC Day in my vibrant community. Living in a boarding school as a high school student is challenging and it is even harder to adapt sometimes when you are in a country with a totally different culture than the one you grew up with. Well, the best part about this experience is the fact I am sharing it with like-minded peers. Days like this give us moments to appreciate and celebrate our cultures and remind us of our purpose here. As part of UWC Day celebrations, we wore our cultural clothes and it was a beautiful sight of learning and experiencing other cultures. But the day wouldn’t be complete without celebrating the UN Peace Day, therefore in the evening, we dressed all in white as a symbol of peace while we shared poems and cultural dances. Standing there on the stage, wearing all white, carrying my flag, and reading a poem to start the vibrant celebrations was a truly memorable moment. It was a day many flags were waved with similar wishes in our hearts —a better, safer, and more peaceful world. 

As If You are a Politician

As a competitive debater both on a national and international scale since 2020, I had my very first Model United Nations (MUN) this September acting as if I were a politician. I participated in the UWCCR Model United Nations Conference as the Chair of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Committee. This is a mouthful but what this essentially means is my responsibility was to create an efficient and safe debate environment for the delegates participating. During our three days at the conference, we focused on ensuring the safety of asylum seekers as one of the issues highlighted in the UNHCR Model UN Challenge for 2023. It was a good mix of diplomacy and moderated chaos instead of caucus.

October

First Hackathon in TKS

On the 15th of October, I presented how triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) can be used in the aviation industry for a greener future. This was part of the TKS Explore Hackathon in which we had a little less than a week to present a recent technology that we thought had the potential to change the future. 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions belong to the aviation industry and utilizing TENGs allows 12% of fuel used to be saved, therefore this creates a huge reduction in global CO₂ emissions.

Our team, consisting of Rittrija Mandal, Zara Bhandari, Merken Habte, Alia Hernandez, and I, won the Best Presentation Award (also known as the TED Award). Meanwhile, this hackathon experience left me with valuable insights:

1. Hackathons are meant to be intense, learn to take breaks to come back stronger.

2. A new and groundbreaking technology is unfamiliar, show implementations in other fields to make it more familiar.

3. Don’t be afraid to be human when presenting, being human means understanding what gets the attention of a human.

Are you curious about this technology? Check out my presentation!

Leveling Up How You Study

Oh the midterm season, every student’s absolute favorite. Even though this sentence is full of sarcasm if you want a more enjoyable midterm season, here are some insights that might be relatable to you:

1. Don’t push sleep in the second plan! Yes, I know, it’s cliche but the importance of sleep especially before timed assessments is incredibly easy to ignore. Giving up a few hours of sleep for last-minute cramming seemed like a good idea to all at some point but I promise it is not. Being sleep-deprived messes up your focus and makes you lose time as well as points. 

2. Figure out how different study methods affect you. You might have heard to “find the right study technique for you.” However, you need to recognize how different methods benefit you in order to use them effectively, and more often than not one study method is not good in all cases. For example, I am an auditory learner when it comes to revising concepts and a textual learner in practicing skills learned from a class. 

3. Don’t forget to take breaks! While it sometimes feels good to just sit there and cram for hours, the odds are at some point it becomes very inefficient for you due to both physical and mental fatigue. This point is different for everyone and how you use your brakes will change from person to person but it is important regardless to notice when you start not to have a yield from your studies.

These are just very broad observations I had from my own experiences and they don’t have to apply to you but the next time your exams or important deadlines are creeping up they might be helpful. 

Biodiversity and Costa Rica

Costa Rica is a Central American country known for its biodiversity. When I first came here to study, one expression I heard stuck with me, “Costa Rica accounts for only 0.03 percent of the earth's surface. However, it contains nearly 6 percent of the world's biodiversity.” It is mindblowing! Recently I had the chance to visit Cahuita National Park located in Limon Province. It was a truly enchanting place full of life, and I got to see animals like monkeys and sloths that I only have seen in pictures before. I want to use this as an opportunity to remind all of us that if we want generations following us to be able to have this amazing experience, we need to keep our damage to our one and only Earth in check. Change comes from youth!

No October, Yes Inktober!

Inktober invites artists worldwide to create daily ink drawings for the entirety of the month responding to several prompts. This year I had the determination to do the challenge for the whole month and I did it! I will be honest in saying many of the drawings during the month were not of the best standard but my goal while going into this challenge wasn’t to create masterpieces I just wanted to bring back the habit of drawing regularly into my life and I have been successful at that. Drawing is a great way to let your thoughts wander and act on your imagination, therefore having habits regarding self-expression such as drawing daily helps us understand ourselves and make sense of the world around us. Here are some of my favorite drawings from the month!

Check These Out

You have reached the end of this scroll, check out these before reading the next one.

• Physics 2023 Nobel Prize: Why Did Attosecond Physics Win the Nobel Prize?

• Upcoming Rhodes Technology & Society Forum

• More Sustainable Method of 3D Printing Steel by the University of Cambridge

Not surprisingly getting people and the necessary equipment there is not easy, so space journeys and the developments of the technologies used come at a cost, not only in terms of money but also ecologically. There are tremendous emissions alongside the debris from these missions. To be more precise, according to Breeze Technologies, the typical 6 to 12 hours long-haul flight releases 1 to 3 tonnes of CO2 per passenger. This number is between 50 and 75 tonnes per passenger on rocket launches. Space travel without precautions is the perfect opportunity to pollute both our atmosphere and space. Alongside the literal damage these missions cause they also bring social damage by shifting the focus on ecological crisis from saving Earth to just migrating to another.

Habitation of another planet next to us or very very far away shouldn’t be the Plan B to the planet we are on right now, because there is a lot worth saving. However, the possibility of always hopping onto another planet is enough to make people forget about our only home for now. This possibility of space travel shouldn’t be an excuse to give up on ecological efforts. The biodiversity and years of history on Earth are things that can’t be replaced. Would you prefer if the next generations could only read about these things?

However, this isn’t supposed to be a war on developments towards space exploration. As part of our human nature, we want to discover what’s behind the horizon. Learning more about space and being invested in developments is impressive. I would even call myself a space nerd. So, my point isn’t to just cease these missions at once. It’s just that there should be mitigation efforts involved. This mindset of discovering, depleting, and departing isn’t sustainable. Are we going to repeat that cycle again and again on every single planet as humanity?

Space colonization is remarkable but a slippery slope. It is important to keep the balance of discovery and care both for our own planet and the places we are yet to visit. Only then humanity can evolve while not damaging and that is something the whole of humanity should yearn for if we don’t want to leave behind what we have built every few generations and be left with only the emptiness of space to call home.

If you enjoyed reading this, I would recommend you check out the sources below.

The Guardian Article by Katharine Gammon

BBC Future Article by David Robson

This mental comparison explains why art and its message tend to come off more strongly than flat-out saying it. Emotions are unique for everyone's experience and that reflects onto art easier than it would to an essay or an article. This human aspect of art raises the question about AI (artificial intelligence) generated art and its quality as art.

Art AI models, like other AI’s use what they have been fed to create something more like it. For an AI to work well, it needs to be in the golden zone of training where it is not trained too much with very similar data but still has been trained with a high amount of data that has a good variety. This way of AI feeding on previous knowledge is fine but this is an unordinary situation when it comes to art. Artists work hard to create their pieces and what art AI models do is basically use the artworks of many artists to train without getting permission and create amalgams of those artworks to generate more.

The sheer volume of the data used makes asking every single artist to use their art and compensate for it practically impossible especially if we are looking at very developed models like DALL-E 2 or Midjourney. But is this really an ethical practice?

AI art models are out there in the world and they will not disappear overnight, so it is important to create ethical guidelines while using them rather than just abolishing them–which is quite impossible to do for anything on the internet. As long as it is not used commercially AI art could be fun. It could even be used as a tool by artists. Maybe you are unsure about a composition? Or you can’t decide which medium to use for your next project? Just generate some samples and work from there.

There is no need to create crisis scenarios saying artists will be out of their jobs and AI art is going to take over. Creating art is not an exclusive thing to one entity. Both the artists and AI models will continue, some artists will utilize AI and some will not. Ultimately don’t forget the artworks that were used to train those AIs the next time you look at an AI-generated image.

Lastly, I will leave you with a little experiment I did on Nighcafe. All the images below were generated with the same prompt: “An artist deciding whether to pick a brush or a pencil. The hand of the artist is in the picture and there is a blank page on the table.” They were created on NightCafe with respective preset styles; striking, hyperreal, and color painting.

The question the title suggests is broad and one that lacks a simple answer unless it’s a dictionary definition. According to the Oxford Dictionary, an entrepreneur is “a person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.” While the idea of being your own boss and creating a business seems cool, what is the actual deal with being an entrepreneur? 

Words usually have underlying meanings that don’t reveal themselves at first glance and this is very well the case for the word entrepreneur. To dissect the underlying meaning of the word it is important to understand the impact entrepreneurs make on society. A more encompassing definition with that in mind would be: An entrepreneur is a person who can put themselves out there to do something for the right reasons and at the right time.

The main difference between the traditional businessperson and the entrepreneur is how they view society from their perspective. These two terms are, of course, not mutually exclusive but it is possible to create a distinction between them. This is where the concept of a cause would come in. An entrepreneur has a cause that they will strive to achieve. Whether it’s working on engineering solutions for increased ecological sustainability or creating a non-profit business for social change, an entrepreneur wants to make an impact, not just profit.

The burden of doing things for “the right reason” puts money on the spot. When it comes to money, its necessity is undeniable. But sometimes, the involvement of profits may seem to conflict with the authenticity of the claim of working for an impact. In order to clear up this connotation of profits being evil, it is worth noting even the most perfect idea that will do immense good for humanity needs funds to start and grow. Therefore the legitimacy of an entrepreneur's cause shouldn’t be determined based on their monetary decisions unless they actively hurt someone. Handling money is just an inherent part of being an entrepreneur.

Coming back to the initial revised definition, one key aspect is, “the right time.” While having great ideas is exciting, executing those ideas is the goal of an entrepreneur. On that path, being able to take cautious risks is the key. Just guessing what people actually need without proper research or just going under insane amounts of debt without financial security is not helpful to anybody, an entrepreneur has to be able to understand both the people and themselves.

Thus the recipe for an entrepreneur is: 

-Knowing yourself and the people you want to do good for so you can be unique in your journey as an entrepreneur

-Knowing your strengths and weaknesses so you can assess risks in order to make the right decisions, not just brave ones

-And lastly, knowing what to expect from the real world whether it be success or failure so you can persevere through challenges

Maybe this wasn’t the most straightforward answer to the opening question, but just like how people have various versions of a recipe, how different people would view an entrepreneur is not the same, and these different recipes or definitions are worth exploring. The only thing that is certain is that if you are a person that is always flooded with different ideas, maybe you can give some of them a chance one day.