Two days before the spring student organization fair, Ruveyda Yenigun pleaded with the organizers to let the hours-old Turkish Student Association set up a booth.
Jackie Victory, MTSU’s Director of Student Organizations and Service, approved the Turkish Student Association as a new club that day, past the deadline to register for the organization fair. The Center for Student Involvement and Leadership made an exception.
Yenigun is ecstatic they did.
Though this is the Turkish Student Association’s first semester and they were low on time to plan events, they’ve already held a Turkish dance night, a Turkish cultural night and a bake sale — all of which served Turkish tea. Before starting the club, Yenigun only knew of a few other Turkish students and a couple of Turkish professors. She knew there were similar organizations like the Muslim Student Association, but there was nothing to represent Turkish culture.
Yenigun started the organization from the ground up; the idea originally stemmed from a joke with a friend.
“That seems something so far-fetched that I didn’t even believe it,” Yenigun said. “I was just, like, joking about it. But it took some time for us to even find each other, like to find the other officers. And after getting to know them, it became to seem a lot more realistic that we can do it. We can do something like this.”
Yenigun recruited Gamze Mert, a junior transfer student and international student from Turkey, to co-found the organization. For both, starting the club offered a way to share Turkish culture rather than having the goal of finding and connecting a community of Turkish students at MTSU. They began planning events that showcased Turkish culture with food, dancing and language.
At the first event, an interest meeting, they planned a word of the day — “merhaba,” meaning “hello” — and a question of the day: “What do you know about Turkey?” They also shared Turkish food and tea while playing bingo and taking pictures at a photo booth.
“The thing was, like, we had scheduled that room until 8 [p.m.],” Yenigun said. “It was 9 p.m. when the staff came in and told us to leave. No one wanted to leave. We couldn’t get people to leave.”
Mert and Yenigun received an outpouring of support that they never expected when starting the club. Yenigun often receives texts from MTSU students and people in the Turkish community throughout Middle Tennessee.
“It’s another world, to be honest,” Mert said. “It’s also like this feeling of connection and belonging and also sharing this warm feeling with other people … We were all so eager and we were all so ready for it because we knew people wanted to hear from us.”
The group’s largest event — a Turkish dance night held on Feb. 21 — drew more than 60 people. At the dance, Yenigun saw other Turkish people join and share culture from their perspectives.
“The special thing about Turkish culture is that it brings everyone together. Even our dances, when you’re dancing it, everyone gets hand-in-hand. We connect our fingers like this,” Yenigun said, interlocking her pinkies together. “When you make a mistake, no one notices it, so even people that are shy to dance get to dance. Everyone is included. Everyone does everything together.”
The group plans to host a movie night later this spring and a VR Turkey night at the end of the semester. The group plans to host events outside of campus, too, including a cultural showcase at Tennessee Tech University in April.
Officers of the Turkish Student Association are learning as they go because many of them have never led an organization before. MTSU faculty, like Victory, have been a huge help throughout the process of growing the association, Mert and Yenigun said.
“I was emailing her like day and night,” Yenigun said. “She got back to every single one of them. That was a crazy week for us, but we got through it.”
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