From Fuvahmulah to Ankara with Love
Let me take you back to where it all started. After my A-levels, I was working at the Marine Research Centre in the Maldives, planning the next phase of my life, and my heart was set on the UK. Manchester, Edinburgh, UCL, King's College London, Warwick, the big names. That was the dream, and it wasn't really a dream I had chosen so much as one I had inherited. I'd grown up hearing that UK universities were the gold standard, and I had never once checked what else existed, which in hindsight is the detail that matters most in this story. I applied, received offers, and found myself choosing between UCL and Edinburgh. The plan was simple. Get in, study engineering, absorb the prestige. Then came the number.
The full cost, tuition and living, worked out to about 170,000 British pounds, and at the exchange rate of the time, roughly 23 rufiyaa to the pound, that's 3.3 million MVR. The figure still makes my head spin. I couldn't access the merit scholarships my friends back home received, because I'd done my A-levels outside the Maldives, and there were no government student loan schemes then. What there was, was my father, prepared to put our house in Fuvahmulah on the line for a BML "Kiyavaa" loan, a monstrous programme carrying sky-high interest rates. I owe him everything. He cares deeply about education and wanted me to make something of my life, and he went as far as borrowing cash from a friend just to fund the student visa application. So off I went to Sri Lanka in March 2013, buzzing, convinced this was the beginning.
The visa was rejected. Something about my bank account not showing sufficient funds across the preceding twelve months. I was crushed, and while it wasn't the end of the world, at that age it felt indistinguishable from it. My father went to war with the bank, calling relentlessly, trying to fix the paperwork. I did something different, I started running the numbers properly for the first time, and the numbers were bleak. How was he going to service that loan? How was I? We were not the kind of family that shrugs off debt of that scale. And the Kiyavaa structure, at least as I understood it then, demanded repayment starting the moment I finished my undergraduate degree, which raised a question my carefully mapped plans had no answer to, what about postgrad? What then? I moped. I'll admit it plainly, I was down in a way I hadn't been before.
Then came the conversation that changed the trajectory. A friend of mine studying medicine in Turkey mentioned, almost in passing, that there were decent universities there, and across Europe generally. I wasn't sold, the UK dream was still very much alive in me, but it planted the question, and the question sent me to the Times Higher Education and QS rankings to actually look for the first time. Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey. Istanbul Technical University, Middle East Technical University, Bilkent University. I sent out applications as backups, without any real intent behind them. My head was still in UCL and Edinburgh, where I'd already mapped my postgraduate route, PhD plans included. I'm the type who plans several moves too far ahead.
A few weeks later the offers arrived, and with them the costs, and this is where a belief I didn't know I held got dismantled. ETH Zurich, TU Munich, TU Delft, genuinely top-tier institutions, charging a fraction of the UK figure. Lower-ranked UK universities were charging considerably more than these heavyweights. Bilkent, with its merit scholarship, came out effectively free. My first reaction was disbelief, because I had absorbed, without ever examining it, the idea that price signals quality, that good universities are expensive and cheap ones are suspect. What the numbers in front of me actually showed is that UK tuition reflected what the market would bear, the prestige premium, the brand, the accumulated weight of everyone believing what I believed, and not the underlying quality of the education. Those are different quantities, and I had spent years treating them as one. I dug through forums, videos, anything I could find, and the conclusion held up everywhere I tested it, quality education did not have to cost an arm and a leg. Which raised the more uncomfortable question of why all of us Maldivians were so fixated on the UK when Europe and Asia offered options this strong, NUS, NTU, SNU, KAIST, all of them big league. The honest answer, I think, is that it was an information problem sustaining itself. Everyone believed the UK was the only serious path because everyone believed it, and nobody checked, and the narrative survived precisely because checking never happened. I only escaped it by the accident of one conversation with one friend.
I took it to my father. He said the decision was mine and that he would take the loan if I chose the UK, but I could hear the weight lift from him when I described the alternatives. Bilkent had caught my attention in a serious way by then. Fully English-taught, an engineering faculty stacked with professors from MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Caltech, and the obvious question was what people of that calibre were doing in Ankara. The answer, it turned out, is that Bilkent's engineering programme was deliberately modelled on Carnegie Mellon and Columbia, with coursework calibrated to match, and its alumni were surfacing in PhD programmes at Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Princeton. My friend in Turkey closed the loop, Bilkent's in Ankara, she was at Hacettepe nearby, and the small Maldivian community there would help me land. I thought it through and accepted. Relieved doesn't begin to describe my father.
I knew nothing about Turkey. The culture, the people, nothing, it had never crossed my mind as a place I'd end up. I packed, flew to Ankara for the fall semester, and arrived carrying zero expectations, which turned out to be the right amount, because every one I might have carried would have been wrong. Ankara was modern, clean, organised, nothing like the dusty stereotype. The people confounded my assumptions too, I'd vaguely equated Turkish with Arab, which seemed to be the general narrative among most Maldivians, and instead found a city where most people would pass unremarked in Western Europe. Then I reached Bilkent's campus, and I'll allow myself the reaction I had at the time, massive, green, classical buildings set among forests, like walking onto a film set.
First day of class was Calculus 101, and I walked in confident. Mathematics and the physical sciences had always come easily to me, I'd worked through stacks of books across grade school and taken Further Maths at A-level because the standard paper wasn't challenging me, so I figured I'd coast. I did not coast. The syllabus looked basic on paper and the level was ferocious, because my classmates were Turkey's top scorers from a brutally competitive national entrance exam, and I had been dropped into the deep end without floaties. This is where Bilkent's structure saved me. Classes were small and intense, and every new student was attached to a senior faculty mentor, mine being Asst. Prof. Mehmet Zayed Baykara, a Yale PhD with a string of prestigious awards, previously at Columbia and Harvard, now Vice Chair of Engineering at UC Merced. He gave it to me straight: "International students always feel behind at first. Our courses match Ivy League standards. Put in the work, you'll catch up." That landed hard, and it reframed the situation from a verdict into a variable. I wasn't going to drown, I was going to swim.
So the grind began. Classes all day, labs, then straight to the library, dinner at 5:30, books until 11:30, every night without exception, Saturdays excepted. That rhythm became my life, and Bilkent didn't just teach me engineering, it rewired me. I went in as a kid obsessed with UK prestige, convinced it was the only path, and came out tougher, sharper, and with my eyes properly open to the world. It stands, without much competition, as one of the best decisions I've ever made, and it's worth remembering it was nearly made for me by a rejected visa rather than by any wisdom of my own.
The whole experience, settling into Ankara, figuring out Turkey, surviving Bilkent's intensity, changed me in ways I still haven't fully worked through, and I may write a separate post on the university years themselves, the late nights, the friends, the chaos. For now I'll leave it at this. Life is wild. You think you have it all figured out, then it throws you a curveball, and sometimes that curveball turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to you.