Fellow:Selenay Sonay Tufan


Name Selenay Sonay Tufan School (Cohort) Istanbul Technical University (2020 cohort) Majoring in Mechanical Engineering Country Turkey Email Special:EmailUser/SelenaySonayTufan

Bio

Selenay Sonay Tufan was born in Istanbul/Şişli in 2000. She completed her primary, secondary and high school education in Şişli and still lives there. She completed her high school education at Nişantaşı Anatolian High School [1] (English High School for Boys) and then, as a mechanical engineer, she studied English at Yıldız Technical University for a year. After completing her one-year English education, she changed her school and department with a serious decision. With this decision, she moved to Istanbul Technical University(ITU) [2] civil engineering department. And she studied civil engineering for 1 year. At the end of this year, she moved to the mechanical engineering department with the " opportunity to change departments for students who have high GPA " offered by her school. And she is studying mechanical engineering at Istanbul Technical University since October 2020.

During her high school years, she worked many times in organizations that required teamwork. Also, she was in an award program that aims to prepare young people for today's world. The name of this award program is The Duke Of Edinburgh's International Award [3] and it is an international program that every young person between the ages of 14-24 can attend. The program is categorized as Bronze-Silver-Gold. During her high school years she finished the first level of this program(Bronze), and in the third year of her university life she finished the second level(Silver). She is currently trying to complete the last level of this program(Gold).

However, she took an active role in many student clubs during the year she was a student at Yıldız Technical University. These student clubs were generally about entrepreneurship and the industry. In addition, as her special interest, she was a support team member(Thanks to this team, she received a lot of training about racing cars.) in the race car team at her school for the international Formula Student [4] race during the year she was there. When she came to Istanbul Technical University, she had discovered her interests more and almost all the activities she participated in were about entrepreneurship and finding a solution to a problem.

Her acquaintance with the University Innovation Fellows program is the result of these activities she participated in. She was in a program called Fire Up at their university and some of their teammates would be nominated for the UIF program according to their success in this program. They all worked hard and came up with some solutions to the problems at our university. They were then selected for the UIF program by votes cast in their university's Fire Up program.

As a University Innovation Fellow, she and other members of the team developed the Learning Community program to foster the innovation culture at their university. The Learning Community program is a highly interactive program that lasts for about two months. At the end of the program, there was even a graduation celebration with more than one hundred graduates. The project she developed within the UIF program is a socialization program called "BeeDays". The main purpose of the BeeDays project is to avoid the socialization problem at her university. Every student participating in this program stated that they would like to participate in "BeeDays-2" as well.

She has been playing the piano since her high school years. This was her childhood dream and she was able to deal with this dream only in high school years. She has been doing archery and practicing yoga since the first year of her university life.

She loves meeting new people and creating new ideas. She believes that with her teammates in this program, they will produce innovative ideas and create a positive impact by solving a important problem.