"A multicultural environment"

I am Zeynep Temimhan, I am from Turkey and I come from Izmir, a nice and sunny seaside city in the western part of Turkey. I have recently graduated from the Global Politics and International Relations master’s degree with 110/110L.

During my study, I have been awarded by Invest Your Talent in Italy scholarship. Invest your talent in Italy scholarship is a scholarship awarded to successful students from developing countries to continue their education in Italy. Within the scope of this scholarship, students can have the chance to do an internship in Italian companies where they can apply their theoretical knowledge into practice.

I chose this master's degree because it gave me the chance to continue in the same scope of my undergraduate degree (Political Science) at the same time, allowing me to specialise in a few more areas of my interest. The programme offers three different curriculum options, where the students can decide on the classes they want to attend.

Within the scope of my curriculum, I had the chance to work on joint research projects and prepare presentations with my classmates from all over the world such as Russia, Kazakhstan, Ghana, Nigeria, Brazil, Vietnam , Mexico and I have also participated in global projects such as X-Culture where I could work on business cases in collaboration with graduate students from other countries.

Thanks to the multicultural environment we had in our classes and in our faculty, I had a chance to get to know different cultures and perspectives and to learn in a very dynamic and active ambience. Although we continue our classes in an online modality during the quarantine due to Covid19, our interaction with the professors and the classmates never stopped. During these two years, I have also attended the Italian and German language classes which were though by native speakers. Since I have attended these language classes with students from other faculties, it was a nice opportunity to meet with other students outside my faculty.

In fact, the city of Macerata offers a great chance to meet many students very easily, as it is a small and historical student city and has an active student life.

In the second year of the program, I have worked as an intern for t33 sound policy for 4 months.

During this experience, I contributed to researches by collecting data, analysing data, conducting literature reviews in cooperation with the experts from European Commission and related DGs and public policy experts from different countries.

I had the chance to write small parts in reports and publishing, which later helped me during my thesis process. The time I spent in a very pleasant office environment with my colleagues from France, Romania and Croatia also helped me a lot in deciding what profession I would like to do in the future.