Impact

She came to pick me up from the Istanbul airport. Later that day, I had a midnight bus to Ören (a coastal town west of Turkey), where my parents were at the time. We would hang out at her place till then. She prepared menemen and fresh green beans, some of my favorite Turkish dishes, for dinner. Those are the moments I take off the 40 layers of armor I accumulated over the years living abroad and start feeling lighter.

She has always been very generous with me and she loves me very much. She was at my public defense at EPFL. She was there when I first moved to Copenhagen. She is like an older sister, one of the many I have despite being the only child of my parents. The reason she loves me, though, doesn’t have much to do with me. I know that. She loves me because she loves my mother.

My mother was one of her professors at the university. I am very well aware that she doesn’t take all her professors’ kids from the airport. She loves my mother because she values the impact my mother had and maybe still have on her life as a teacher. I value the impact both of them have on my life.

She is not the only ex-student my mother has that has been extremely generous with us as a family. In fact, there was one other ex-student of my mom at my public defense at EPFL, and shortly after I moved to Copenhagen, I met two of my mom’s ex-students who live in the area. My dad has some ex-students that are similar, though my mom would win by a landslide if it was a competition. This doesn’t mean that all her students loved her, as I also witnessed students who treated my mom as if she was a witch to be burned.

I ended up a university professor myself, just like my parents, as cliché as it is. I cannot tell you that I wanted to be professor in a computer science department as a child. At those ages, I wanted to be million things from a basketball player to a traveling hobbit. But I wished for a job that can incorporate some teaching/mentoring component, since I dreamed of having the kind of impact I observed my parents had on many of their students as well as some of my school teachers had on me. Having that type of direct impact on an individual’s life seemed like the biggest kind of impact one can have in this world to me.

 

In my professional community, the dominant use of the word impact has a different meaning than the one I related to growing up. Most people would use it to indicate either creating a (software/hardware) product or writing code for a (software/hardware) product. While I recognize this as an extremely valuable impact one can have in life and I admire the people who accomplish it, I must confess that this has never been the main driving force in my work. When I was at IBM Research, I was in a team that designed and wrote code for a new IBM product, and I enjoyed that work and I am happy the product is out, but more than that, I enjoyed having student interns. Most of the time, I feel scared to say these things out loud at a work-related gathering, where academics tend to be mocked for not accomplishing real-world impact with a disregard of the role of advisors and mentors in someone’s life.

Of course I want to do research on things that have real-world relevance. But more than that I want to help raising the next-generation for our professional community. Even if a PhD student is working on a topic that you think have no real-world impact, it is still highly likely that he/she is actually learning the skillset that will be guiding him/her toward his/her real-world impact once on the job.

 

As the diversity & inclusion efforts are increasing in many scientific communities these days, I think we should also start thinking about valuing the different driving forces and capabilities of individuals at work leading to different forms of impact in our scientific fields.

 

In closing, I want to say that I am extremely grateful for the impact both my BSc advisor Serdar Taşıran, and my PhD advisor Natassa Ailamaki had in my life. And I am still part of the “real-world” despite my dreams of becoming a hobbit, and would be happy to prepare menemen for their kids.