If you are interested in doing an M.S or a Ph.D. study with me as your advisor (hence taking one of these courses with me as your instructor), please follow the steps detailed below.
Having been accepted to this program, I’m sure you are already sufficiently proficient in English to follow the course material (which is in English by the article 5/1 of Regulations). However, high energy and mathematical physics (and especially the branches that I work on) are very dynamic fields, meaning that a high volume of articles are constantly being published. Doing a Ph.D. studies with me will require you to read a lot of articles, something which would be rather heavy on you if your English is not on par.
At the end of the day, your graduate studies should be something you can enjoy without getting overwhelmed or experiencing a burnout. Thus, I highly advice you to check out some articles in high energy theory to see if you can easily follow them: it is perfectly okay not to be familiar with technical vocabulary (such as cohomology or moduli space), just make sure your inability to follow a paper (if any) has nothing to do with language!
We are social creatures! Even while working in abstract fields like mathematical or theoretical physics, we still remain emotional beings: we will be more motivated to learn something if we like our instructor, we will be eager to help our research partners if we are good friends with them, and our emotions will be better regulated in our work environment if we feel belonging there.
This is vitally important during your graduate studies and your postdoctoral years afterwards: if you are with wrong people, your life can turn into hell very quickly! Even though you always have the option to change your advisor afterwards, it is still a lot of hassle for you hence you should try to make this judgment before asking me to be your instructor.
Here are a few things that should help you make an educated judgment:
I take academic integrity with utmost importance. I would like to emphasize this: I WOULD NOT TOLERATE ACADEMIC DISHONESTY!
My apologies for this somewhat rude tone, but unfortunately academic dishonesty is somewhat common in Turkey. METU is way above the average, but students are exposed to incorrect role models throughout their early lives, hence can even be oblivious to what is academically moral and what is not!
If you would like to work with me, please first read my explanations of the expected academic integrity: if you do not fullheartedly agree with my points there, there is little chance that we could get along as mentor and mentee.
I take my work seriously. I will do my best to guide you, not only because I see this as my job but also because I genuinely care about potential young scientists (and how I could help them). But this also means that I expect you to take our work seriously and do your best to hone your skills!
This is a very important point because theoretical physics is a really abstract realm and aiming to be a good scientist in this field is a genuinely challenging task! The main part of the challenge is our nature: we members of Homo sapiens are tool using creatures, and are evolved to use everything as tools for ourselves —knowledge is no exception. When we learn something new, our natural instinct is to find out where we can use it, or what it is good for. This is why seeing concrete examples help us learn something better, why students tend to study for an exam by solving similar questions, and why utility is an intrinsic motivation for almost everyone. Theoretical physics is bereft of this instinctual motivation.
What is my point? You have to have a strong resolve, a genuine curiosity towards nature/math, and a strong willpower to keep working on this field. And only then, you can take our collaboration seriously enough to make the most of it!
It is vitally important that you fully understand what being a graduate student means and how much help or involvement you can actually expect from your advisor. Please, carefully read what follows.
Bluntly, I will have two roles as your advisor: (a) your academic mentor, (b) your research collaborator.
As your academic mentor, I will try to help you learn how research is done, what academic resources you should use, how you may want to plan a career for yourself, and so on. Although technically you are a student, I will rather see our relation as mentor and mentee since student-teacher relation has a connotation of a power structure. This means you have far more freedom and autonomy (especially compared to your undergraduate years), but also far more responsibility.
As your research collaborator, we are on a completely equal footing: we are two physicists collaborating on a project (which may/may not happen to be your first project). Optimistically, our project will lead to publications, but we may not have sufficient results for a publication either. Ultimately, whether a research project leads to a publication in a certain amount of time (or ever) depends on the real-world conditions: how much time the members can spend on that particular project, if someone else beats them to the punch, whether there are unexpected setbacks on the project, and so on. It is also quite common for a project to start without finishing, or with collaborators drifting apart and completing their research with other people. Your studies is not much different than the real world projects! If we start together and our research seems to stall, you should try to find other advisors! Conversely, if I decide that our collaboration seems to be insufficient for you to develop your skills to rightfully obtain your degree, then I will stop being your advisor (you will need to find a new one).
No one likes to read regulations in their spare times, and I do not expect you to be any different. Indeed, Registrar’s Office and Departments’ Secretary would do their best to help you in any problem you might have. If we work together, I would also do my best as your advisor to guide you through any situation, but I’d like to let you know upfront: it is your responsibility to make sure you are complying with the regulations; I can at most help you if I can.
Having warned you upfront, let me strongly advice you to read the Regulations: this would help you understand what this program entails, and what pitfalls you should avoid; for instance, receiving the letter grade “U” twice consecutively gets you dismissed from the program (see article 27/1). Another example would be the successful graduation condition for the PhD study: learning how to generate novel and new knowledge (and actually doing it) is the aim of doctoral studies everywhere around the world, including Middle East Technical University (see article 38/1 of Regulations).