From Task to Mission: Research, Idealism, and Reality in Postgraduate Life

Many postgraduate students start with ambition and gradually find themselves just getting things done. This seminar is about that gap: between why you started and what the work actually looks like day to day.

Drawing on experience as a research assistant and PhD candidate at Kadir Has University, this talk examines what early-career research actually involves: building a doctoral study that combines OSINT and Federated Learning for anomaly detection in critical infrastructure, translating findings into actionable outputs using frameworks such as MITRE and NIST, and getting a TÜBİTAK 1001 project accepted in a system that was not designed with postgraduate researchers in mind.

The goal is not inspiration. It is an honest account of how academic research gets built and why it still matters.

Seminar title: From Task to Mission: Research, Idealism, and Reality in Postgraduate Life

Speaker: Mert İlhan Ecevit ( Kadir Has University - MIS Department, Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection Research Center (CCIP UAM))

Time/Date: 14:00 / 06.05.2026

Location: IB412, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, South Campus