This month I had the pleasure to meet with Ece Ozdemiroglu & Suna Akartuna, to talk over with them about ATA's future plans
and their Education project to help young students carve out a professional career path in the UK.

  Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Ece: I'm an environmental economist, which basically means I'm an economist that specialises in environmental policy; I've been in UK for 14 years and run a company called Eftec. I am also one of the 7 coordinators of ATA.

Suna: I’m a compliance officer working for the Legal and General Assurance Society Limited.I have been living in London almost 15 years. I came to the UK with my husband for his postgraduate education. Later I did a Master at the London School of Economics. I changed my profession from an engineering background, attained at the METU, Ankara, to finance. I am one of the founders and co-ordinators of the ATA.

  Can you tell us a bit about how you started Eftec?

Ece: I also came here (UK) for education as well, I did economics at University of Istanbul in Turkey, I wanted to specialise in environmental studies but at the time -the early nineties- there were not that many post-graduate courses available for this topic, so I decided to come to London to study. Later on I began to realise that there was a gap in the market for this field to specialise in so with help from some of my professors at University College London, I set up the company after finishing my course.

  So this is your first job? Was it a steep learning curve?

Ece: I never thought about it as a big venture, more as a company with an image of its people who really like their job and the field. It just means that having a company structure helps us do the things that we want to do, rather than a big investment and being managers. I did not have these interests…we treat it more as writing essays and making reports and being a smaller company, we have greater flexibility on time and on the sorts of things we want to work on.

  Do you believe that the number of Turkish students in the UK reaching university is sufficient?

Ece: I think our general feeling is that even at school level the success rate is quite low, which means that even if younger people wanted to go to university they couldn't, this is often not due to their inability but more factors such as hope, what is there in the future.

Suna: I met two young girls at one of our careers evening. One was a university student. We had a discussion, and I really liked her, obviously she tried hard. Her other friend was not interested in going to university. I talked to her and asked why she doesn't try. She did not believe that she was good enough. I could not believe that she had no esteem to aspire like her friend. She was very bright like a lot of others but had this misconception they could not achieve and had no role models which I thought was why she was not actively searching for her aspirations. This was the motivation that got us into our education project with ATA.

  ATA has been going for 11 years now with many successful events held throughout this time. What is happening at the moment?

Suna: We have 3 projects going on currently for the coming year, as mentioned the education project, which Ece is heavily involved with. We have our careers evening and we have a seminar series called "On the Way towards the EU" to talk about Turkey joining EU, promoting the understanding of Turkey and its culture not just looking at the political or economic side of things.

  Can you tell us a bit more about the education project?

Ece: We have developed some ideas and projects to help bring our members and young people together to help broaden their horizons, not to impose anything on them, but to show them that there are alternatives and others who have done things that they might like to do.

For example, we will run a mentoring scheme in association with Turkish saturday schools. For example, we may have a student who has expressed ambitions to study law and we will try to pair him/her up with a mentor who is, say, a Solicitor to help him/her try to explore his options and what sort of A-levels s/he might need to take. We are going to tackle this on a small scale at first and grow from this base.

We are not going to go to schools and lecture to them, our mentoring scheme will be more personal and we want to build relationships that allow the students to express themselves freely, listening to their needs and gain trust.

We have quite a few people at the moment who want to work with us, but anyone who would like to get involved can do, please get in touch with us, we are going to provide training for those mentoring, but we only have a limited capacity to manage the project.

  Do you think there is a lack of integration between Turkish born in the UK and those who have come from Turkey later on?

Suna: Yes, I believe so. I did not meet any British born Turkish people while I was studying.

Ece: There is a huge variety of people around 2nd and 3rd generations that have come from Turkey. Their reasons of movement to this country are very different, their social-economic reasons were different and their roots are quite different, so even so from outside we are seen as a single community, it is very heterogeneous and I think just in the same way as people from Sri-Lanka, Germany to Kenya who live in Britain. I do not think the fact that we are not closely knitted is a problem because it is just the same in Turkey.

There are some who have integrated well into British society, and others that have not that well. But "well" is very subjective, some may have not wanted to! And you can't push those into something like this, but as we have seen there have been MP candidates and more people in a public role and integration is increasing.

  Do you have any particular ambitions for ATA?

Suna: Setting up an organisation like ATA is easy, but we want to see its continuation, we want young people to take on executive committee roles so we can train them, so that they can take ATA through to the future continuing our functions and reaching further goals.