{"id":53558,"date":"2012-05-12T20:20:59","date_gmt":"2012-05-12T17:20:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/?p=53558"},"modified":"2014-01-07T16:48:25","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T14:48:25","slug":"students-from-ttu-and-turkey-travel-to-exchange-business-ideas-serve-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2012\/05\/12\/students-from-ttu-and-turkey-travel-to-exchange-business-ideas-serve-others\/","title":{"rendered":"Students From TTU and Turkey Travel to Exchange Business Ideas, Serve Others"},"content":{"rendered":"

Newswise \u2014 Iced Turkish coffee, roasted chickpea snacks, a spiced spread and Turkish olive oil are hard to find in the U.S.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A group of engineering and business students at Tennessee Tech University has studied how to make those products more available as part of a new international service learning project.<\/p>\n

In partnership with students from a university in Turkey, the group of 20 TTU students has developed ideas, from packaging to marketing, to launch sales of Turkish products in the U.S. The group will spend two weeks doing research in the Middle Eastern country this summer, visiting the products\u2019 manufacturers and discussing their plans.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn real life, engineers don\u2019t just do engineering, and business students also have to be able to come out of their silos,\u201d said Meral Anitsal, TTU associate professor of marketing. \u201cIndustry requires collaboration and integration, and we are seeing a need to teach that more.\u201d<\/p>\n

While at Celal Bayar University, which is near the Aegean Sea, the TTU students will work closely with their counterparts in Turkey, who have spent their semester doing nutritional analysis on the different products. They sent samples of the Turkish products to TTU students, who gave out the samples and gathered customer feedback during the Windows on the World international festival at TTU.<\/p>\n

With business plans and marketing analyses behind them, it is now up to the TTU students to decide whether to actually try to launch the products here.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s incubation,\u201d Meral Anitsal said. \u201cI asked my students, \u2018Now that you know these products and you know the contacts in Turkey, will you start a business?\u2019 They said, \u2018Why not?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

When the TTU students return home from Turkey, they will bring a group of students from Celal Bayar with them. They will stay on campus and work on a service learning project in Clay County\u2019s Free Hill area, an unincorporated African American community that was established before the Civil War.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are trying to expose them to many facets of community life,\u201d said Bonita Barger, associate professor of decision sciences and management at TTU and one of the trip coordinators. \u201cThey\u2019re helping us in our community after we\u2019ve helped them in theirs. Grassroots service helps.\u201d<\/p>\n

The informal partnership with Celal Bayar developed through a friendship between that university\u2019s president, Mehmet Pakdemirli, and Ismail Fidan, associate professor of manufacturing and industrial technology at TTU. Ismet Anitsal, associate professor of marketing at TTU, also helped organize the trip.<\/p>\n

Organizers say they hope to continue the service initiative and to involve more TTU faculty and disciplines in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re developing global classes,\u201d Barger said. \u201cThe students have jumped out of the fishbowl, and now they are looking back into the fishbowl of their culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

via Students From TTU and Turkey Travel to Exchange Business Ideas, Serve Others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Newswise \u2014 Iced Turkish coffee, roasted chickpea snacks, a spiced spread and Turkish olive oil are hard to find in the U.S. A group of engineering and business students at Tennessee Tech University has studied how to make those products more available as part of a new international service learning project. In partnership with students […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":53561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[846,845,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-scitech","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}