On this page you can find more biographical and personal info about me. Note that on this page I essentially introduce myself rather than promote my online tutoring. For detailed info about my online tutoring & coaching service, you can visit this page.
I am Ahmet, a full-time online tutor & coach, a physicist with a PhD, and a philosopher with an MSt.
Educational Background:
🎓 B.S. in Physics, Bogazici University, Turkey, 2016
🎓 B.S. in Molecular Biology – Genetics, Bogazici University, Turkey, 2016
🎓 M.A. in Physics, University of California (UC), Berkeley, CA, 2018
🎓 Ph.D. in Physics, University of California (UC), Berkeley, CA, 2021
🎓 M.St. in Philosophy of Physics, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, 2023
🤔 Question: Ahmet, you appear to refer to yourself by your first name only. Is there a reason you don’t write your full name?
🤗 Answer: I am not hiding my full name from people, but I kind of try to hide it from search engine bots like Google or Bing. The reason is, I primarily want my academic work to show up when people search for my full name. By not writing my full name explicitly in the context of my tutoring, I reduce the chances of Google listing my tutoring business along with my academic work. Otherwise, for interested visitors, it is easy to figure out my full name, for instance by looking at the teaching award certificate I share later on this page. With all due respect to the one who must not be named, my full name is not a secret by any means. My use of my first name is just a part of an effort to keep my academic work and tutoring business separate.
Various Notable Achievements & Awards:
🥇 Fulbright Fellowship (2016-2018): Tuition and cost of living support for the first 2 years of graduate education. The Fulbright fellowship is widely considered the most prestigious fellowship a Turkish citizen can be awarded.
🥇 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award (2020): I was awarded after my first semester of teaching at UC Berkeley, based on the end-of-semester reviews I got from the students. You can click here for the certificate.
⚛ Research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN): Throughout my PhD, I was a member of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) and LBNL 4D theory group. I also visited CERN 3 times in total: As an undergraduate summer student (2015, for ~2 months), as a member of the LBNL experimental particle physics group (2016, for ~2 months) and as a member of the Berkeley CTP (2018, for ~6 months).
💯 I scored 990/990 in the GRE physics (Oct 2015), and scored in the top 0.3 percentile in the Turkish University Entrance Exam (2011).
Various Photos:
The remainder of this page is a bit personal, and it is meant to be so. If you decide to prepare for your AP exams with my help, we’ll likely spend many hours doing online sessions together. I think if we’re going to spend hours studying with someone, we all would want to know a bit more than the formal biographical info. I hope the photos and their descriptions below will help provide some of that extra info about me.
For the high-resolution versions, click on the photos.
With My Sister, at CERN
Giving my sister a tour of CERN. Here we’re in front of the sign for “Route A. Einstein”, or A. Einstein Road. Years later, she chose to double major in physics and philosophy, and currently is pursuing a master’s in philosophy of science.
With My Sister, at CERN, #2
With my sister, in front of a section of the Large Hadron Collider LHC. Behind us is building 40, one of the relatively young and good looking buildings in CERN.
Matriculation Day at Oxford
The University of Oxford preserves many of its centuries-old traditions, and one of them is the matriculation day. You’re supposed to wear your sub fusc, yet you’re not supposed to wear the mortarboard yet! The result is hundreds of students wearing black and white, and holding their mortarboards in their hands, as can be seen in the image.
Matriculation Day at Oxford #2
Another photo from the matriculation day, in front of arguably the most famous building in Oxford: Radcliffe Camera. The few students wearing their mortarboards in the background were executed later that day.
Golden Gate Bridge
In front of the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge, with my wife. I lived in the Bay Area for 5 years.
Marin Headlands
Stunning views from Marin Headlands, with my friends Gerald and Ninad.
Bern, Switzerland
With my wife, in Bern, Switzerland. The Old Town in Bern was one of the most beautiful towns I had ever visited. One perk of being a particle physicist is having to visit Switzerland for research.
UC Berkeley
The photo my wife took in front of the DOE library. It is titled “Ahmet, if we don’t take this photo now, you’ll have zero visual proof for your 5 years of study here.”
Nature is Interesting from All Angles
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I studied molecular biology-genetics as well.