My name is Onur Gültekin. I am an industrial engineer who feels himself as a world citizen and has a big aspiration for contributing to the efforts of developing a righteous and social responsible society.
Personally speaking, photography is my passion as of my master study. I started gradually and then developed a great interest in it. I also love to read Turkish novels and world’s classics, and books about politics, philosophy, history. What other things I like to do are cooking, watching theatre and films of American independent cinema, listening to mostly rock and electronic music, travelling, skiing, playing football and basketball.
As for my personal background, I was born in Tuzluca, which is part of Iğdır province in Turkey. I studied there from primary school until the end of my high school education. Thereafter, I went to another city in Turkey called Eskişehir for my study in Industrial Engineering department at Eskişehir Osmangazi University. I studied there for five years including one year of English Preparatory Class.
During university years, I actively took part in various civil initiatives and student organisations as a volunteer such as Community Volunteers Foundation (TOG), European Students’ Forum (Aegee) and Industrial Engineering Students’ Society (EMÖT).
Aegee raised my consciousness about being more open minded and feeling more like world citizen particularly by international organisations that I took part as organizer and attendee. In TOG, I worked as a communication and internship responsible in the local board and worked for numerous projects such as visiting regularly children ill with leukemia and helping them in their lessons, visiting regularly old people in nursing home, creating sight-disabled library for visually handicapped people and so forth. As to EMÖT, it gave me the chance to improve my leadership, negotiation, communication, troubleshooting, presentation, diversity tolerance and surely teamwork competences. I worked as a board member who was in charge of different committees and organizing the first and the biggest national organisation of the club called Akademi-EM (Industrial Engineering Academy). All these experiences gave me precious opportunities to improve and explore my competences.
During my bachelor study, I did also internships in Turkcell and Brisa. I worked with the department manager in Turkcell mainly on benchmarking of Turkcell services with other competitors and evaluating the data of diverse surveys. In Brisa, I was mostly working on time study observations through the private company software (OTRS).
Right after graduating from the university, I went to Luxembourg for working as a volunteer in a European Voluntary Service project that is funded by European Commission. The project was mainly about working for old people by promoting European awareness through cultural differences and similarities, and aiming intergenerational and intercultural interaction. It allowed me for learning and experiencing more about different cultures, different countries and leading, co-working or being supervised by people who are of different nationalities.
After the completion of this one year long project, I started to do my master’s degree in Entrepreneurship and Innovation program at the University of Luxembourg. I graduated from this program with high honor. At the second semester of the program, I worked as an intern in Ernst & Young Luxembourg (EY-Lux) for a specific project and also gave it as a master thesis. The project was about implementing Tax Effective Supply Chain Management approach in the telecommunication industry. EY-Lux has still been using this project as part of their commercial propositions to their multinational clients, which makes me proud.
I then came back to Turkey to do my compulsory military service. I completed the military service at the end of May 2010. I am now at a hairpin bend for my future career development due to seeking out a challenging opportunity in supply chain management, logistics, project management, lean manufacturing and ERP solutions domains for my first professional work experience which corresponds with my profile…
Although I don’t think the latter sentence is a good way of describing or exemplifying the function of industrial engineer, I want to finish with this funny motto; Doctor for the patient, lawyer for advocacy, astronaut to the space. For all others remained, it’s Industrial Engineer :)
