Life is beautiful enough to be seen in clear…
This post will be a little bit different from the other visual stories. The photo was not taken by me but inspired me. Due to this unique feeling, I decided to share my experience with this photo here…
In this post, I will talk about my master thesis presentation. The idea came to my mind while breathing deeply while my eyes closed during a break at the office. I realized that it is the anniversary of the master presentation. My master’s program unexpectedly took 1 year longer and I had very stressful and difficult moments to complete the program. There were two options just before this presentation for me:
Goodbye or Congratulations…
According to institutional rules, I had to finish the program in 3 years in max. The presentation date was at the end of 3 years…
Anyways.. Although it is a technical presentation, I will only mention the photo I used on the 1st slide today.
First of all, let me briefly summarize my adventure… I decided to move forward in the industry after taking a bachelor’s degree in Biomedical engineering, but I was one of those who thought that they could do a master’s degree while working. After interviews, I got a full scholarship to study medical engineering master’s program at a private university…
I had to work harder to take permission to go to university so that my colleagues at work would not be unhappy with my choice .. But over time, for different reasons, I became unhappy and I decided to leave the job.
I was continuing to master and working as a freelancer… One day when I saw the advertisement for the Erasmus program on the billboard, and I caught applying for the program on the last day. After interviews, I forgot the application process while trying to survive as a freelancer… 1-2 weeks later, I received an email and the results were listed. My name was at the top of the winners list… At that time, I wasn’t sure I should be happy or not since I was trying to settle my new lifestyle…
I will continue the rest of this story later in another article. Long story short, after this program, I settled in Barcelona permanently and for my master’s thesis, I studied together with my thesis advisor who lives in Istanbul. Sometimes on weekdays, sometimes on weekends… Of course, my sleep pattern has changed considerably in the last days before the presentation. Because I was trying to check and analyze whether there was any mistake in the calculations among the workload, and on the other hand, I was reading the articles over again and of course already started to see the discussion parts in my dreams… 😂
Let me talk about the subject briefly. As I said above it is under the medical engineering master program. I wrote my thesis on neuroscience.
With using optical technology, we can detect which areas of the brain are active. This is possible by detecting the amount of oxygen in the blood circulating in the parts of the brain. We could read your brain.. For example, how much can you focus on a subject, or you feel tired but your brain is really tired or you like someone but are you really in love 🙂
The brain is actually a complex organ. Therefore, sometimes it may not make sense to read the received signals. It may not be meaningful or only a very low part of it becomes meaningful. However, Of course, it is still possible with removing the noisy signals to obtain meaningful signals. There are different noise-canceling techniques in the literature, but there was no consensus. The aim of my thesis was to compare the most common and effective of these methods on brain data. The goal is to use the best technique to understand the brain, and I analyzed it with the support of my thesis advisor and my colleagues.
I wrote my thesis while I was working in Barcelona. After work at office or institute library or at home during the weekends.
In the end, everything was ready, I prepared my thesis presentation. However, I recognized that the presentation was very technical which was not surprising… 😉
I felt that it was not reflecting me and I wanted to add a little bit of myself. Some people put funny pictures, some are caricatures, some are jokes that don’t make you laugh… However, I was going to talk about the brain, mysterious and attractive… Jury members should feel it too…
When I first saw the image I used, I just said “That’s it” and closed the other Chrome tabs including alternative images.. Everything was designed in seconds in my mind…
This photo was the summary of my thesis that I have been reading and researching for months … A searcher … Yes, you actually see a diver in the photo and he is observing an object … The little fish wandering around…
In this view, I actually felt just like that diver. I had enough equipment to dive, but not enough to get close to the target. I could see it but we were blurry to each other … We could see each other’s lines and we had to get closer to see it in more detail. Yes, I imagined that object in the corner as a brain …
Well, long story short … I would like to give my view of this photograph to the jury members and the audience. I presented it in the first slide without mentioning myself and the topic yet. The jury members were all experienced people and had probably participated in dozens of thesis presentations before me, but this should be different. In general, I always feel this obligation in the steps I take and in the works I do .. Maybe sometimes it is a little exaggeration, but there is nothing to fear, I can intervene with self-control.. 😉😂
The presentation was nice and I graduated.
What am I doing now?
I work in a research institute where the same optical technology is used, and we have used this technology to heal COVID patients in ICUs due to the coronavirus pandemic last year. It was funded by the European Union and has been featured on many news pages.
