Before I came to Yeditepe University, I was quite prejudiced. Is the education good? Is it as successful as advertised? What can this school do for me?! Some hearsay information would almost prevent me from coming to this school and this department, and maybe my whole life would be spent with regrets.
“English Language and Literature” was truly Alice in Wonderland for me. At first, I followed a white rabbit and fell through that hole. The keyhole opened to a completely different world; I found myself in the middle of the Normandy War, and not knowing the spoken language, I tried to understand the names of that country, its history, its language, and its heroes such as Beowulf. With a glass of honey-based beer, I found myself one of the travelers in Canterbury in the pristine greens of Medieval England.
I read, I read a lot, the more I read, the more I plunged into the world of dreams. Whatever Shakespeare has is now mine, I've assimilated it. At night Lady Macbeth takes me to bed, I am so impressed. Even though I couldn't lift Milton's weight, I tried to understand his unique mythology. With Dickens' reality, I learned the difference between two cities, the mountains between two classes, how painful inequality can be. I lingered with Keats to rest my soul, then I reached into Wordsworth's nature, closed my eyes, and ran through Coleridge's clouds. Oh Jane Austen, I fell in love with marriage because of her, I saw everything in pink. Then I was poisoned by Sylvia Plath's gas, so I never mind the marriage and all that melancholy. I entered the Victorian Era and closed myself to society, I became individualized.
You think I was only in England, but the whole world was at our feet. Spanish literature, Italian literature, Greek mythology, centuries-old dramas, in short, whatever you've been dreaming of or wondering about, all of them are now deeply rooted in us.
My department, which I graduated from, has very valuable teachers who help me learn these and make me who I am. Friendship, on the other hand, doesn't just include silly conversations after a while. I will say that after a while, you see yourself as one of the characters and writers that I have compared above, and when you wake up one morning, you can find yourself as a cockroach or you dream of an "Utopia". You say 'why not'. You don't call it imaginary, you persist, you believe and you succeed. I graduated from that university as More's ambassador, and now it's time to create the utopia I believe in with people who think like me.
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