JOURNAL ENTRY 2 
                
                                BEİNG A STUDENT AT METU

      Being a student at Metu causes its students to perceive themselves as priviliged because there is no doubt that Metü is the best university of Turkey and ranks as one of the top 250 universities of the world. Metu attends lots of worldwide competitions every year and gain a lot of worlwide success and prestige, especially in engineering. Moreover, its instructors are of very high quality as they are elected people. It is not easy to become an instructor at Metu and because of this, only those who are competent in their field can teach at metu. Besides, Metu provides a superb educational environment for its students and gives a very good education to them. Therefore, studying at Metu is a concessionary and a source of pride.

      I am glad being at Metu in many ways. Firstly, Metu is a really good university in terms of teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook and the education provided us at Metü is really high in quality. Secondly,its campus was built on such a large area that everthing students need is available on the campus; thus, there is no need to go outside to buy something or meet our own necessities. Moreover, the friendships formed in this campus environment are worth living.There are lots of students' communities or teams and they are open to anyone who want to participate in. To be socialize and make friends, these groups can be very effective and i am of the opinion that a person understands to be studying in a university when he/she becomes to socialize. Thirdly, i am happy because being a student at Metu means learning to stand on its own feet as an individual since Metu gives its students a sense of responsibility in every field by forcing them to make everything by themselves such as registration, taking courses or following assignments. Everybody learns being responsible for the things they do themselves from the courses they take to various activities they engage in. Moreover, there is such an infinite respect at Metu that nobody intereferes in others' works and judges the others for anything. That is to say, Metu teachs to be free but responsible while doing something, which makes students into adults in a sense.

      In addition to its all positive aspects, to studying at Metü is somewhat challenging for its students. The most challenging thing is that unlike other üniversities in Turkey, the language of instruction is English at Metü and those who are not sufficient in English have to study in preparatory school in their first year at Metü to improve their English. However, even if they achieve to pass proficiency exam, they have difficulty in their departments in later years because of English. Although my department is English Language Teaching, i even have hard times in some courses. As for how i cope with this, i can say that i try to do more exercises on English in every part. Another point is that there is a huge burden for students about increased academic demands on the ground that the students are expected to do lots of homeworks, lots of research and lots of study. As a solution to this, i plan to make a schedule about how i can deal with this burden. 

      To sum up, being at metü can be both a concessionary and challenging for its students.