Student at ODTÜ bags job at Amazon

Melike Çalkap - ANKARA

While sharing his success story, a student from Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ), who recently bagged a job at Amazon, one of the companies he dreamed of working at from a very young age, has said that studying dedicatedly in his field of choice is the secret behind his success.

Talking with journalists, Yiğit Varlı, a 22-year-old senior computer engineering student at ODTÜ, stated that the video games he played when he was a child encouraged him to learn software, and then he rolled up his sleeves for a successful career in this sector.

Varlı, who has been working as a software engineer at Amazon’s Ireland office for about six months, explained that the process that led him to success was focusing on developing his own software projects, taking part in universities’ research projects abroad and doing several internships.

“I made a list of things I wanted to do after university, and at the top of the list was to work for the world’s leading technology companies. To realize my dream, I started working while I was still in the preparatory year of university. The reason I started working this early was that I knew it was difficult to find a job at the top companies without any prior work experience. After my internship, I contacted about 70 professors working at universities abroad, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford, Berkeley, Cambridge, Oxford, Purdue, etc., and told them that I wanted to take part in their works. Thus, I had the opportunity to take part in three different research projects,” Varlı said.

Pointing out that these research projects lasted about nine months, Varlı said he then started working as a part-time software engineer in a software company in the U.S. with a remote working model. Simultaneously, he took part in another research project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

“My work experience at Amazon also contributes to my courses at my school, and I don’t even need to study specifically for some courses. I might graduate at the end of this year, but I’m thinking of dropping one of my courses for summer school or the next semester because I also want to enjoy being a student as much as possible,” Varlı added.