Middle East Technical University

I saw a physical flyer in the study abroad office of my university.

and applied and got the scholarship and was like sent off to Ankara for an exchange year at actually weirdly one of Turkey's historically most left wing universities to the Middle Eastern Technical University.

Um, and by the time I finished up my master's degree in near Eastern languages and civilizations in Seattle, I was looking at another, which way Western man, which was, Hey, do you want to get a PhD in like Ottoman youth politics? Or do you want to go get a real job? By that point, I think I had imbibed so much like post-structuralism, cultural studies.

I did my master's thesis on like, you know, it was around the time of like Occupy and the Arab Spring.

One was as a short-lived, he was a very short-lived ambassador in Turkey at the end of the Lyndon Johnson administration, although it was a very, it was not an uneventful tenure.

I mean, he went to Middle East Technical University and gave a speech there during which the student body overturned his armored Cadillac limousine and lit it on fire.

I had any number of Turkish journalists tell me that they had been students at Metu when that happened in the early 1970s.

And whenever I would go and give a speech in Turkey and come back to the embassy and I was asked by the staff how I did, I'd say, well, I exceeded the Comer standard.