National Mermaid Congress “is an academic student congress with the participation of industry professionals, academics, bureaucrats, presidents and representatives of various NGOs and chambers, and students from different departments that lasts 3 nights and 4 days.”
The National Mermaid Congress is an event organized by the Maritime Students Association (DÖDER) that brings together maritime students from all over Turkey and professionals from all fields of maritime industries.
Before we talk about the details of this legendary event, we need to briefly talk about DÖDER itself in order to understand the features that make this event valuable. DÖDER was established in 1999 to bring together all seafarers. It aims to increase the awareness of maritime students in this sector that they have decided to be a part of, to bring together students who will work together or whose field of work will intersect in the future, to brainstorm with each other before entering their business life, to inform the rest of the society about maritime and to benefit both our country and the maritime world.
In order to raise the awareness of the students, they organize activities that bring the students together with the representatives they have appointed to the schools. They prepare and publish informative and entertaining videos that appeal to many fields on their Youtube channels. With the delegations they organize when appropriate, they bring together students from many schools under educational activity programs. With the Denizden magazine they publish (which is also published in English), they not only inform students and the rest of the society, but also show how high the technical knowledge capacity of students can actually reach. As an organization, they continue to develop continuously with their own R&D studies in order to develop themselves and the entire maritime sector, and besides all these, they do much more than just provide quality technical information by directly touching the society when necessary with their social responsibility projects. Moreover, all this is done entirely by the voluntary undertaking of the tasks by the students and with the support of sponsors when needed.
Although they regularly carry out many different projects and events, one of their craziest projects is the National Mermaid Congress. The Mermaid Congress arranged every year for 3 nights and 4 days, in a different city. Includes talks from every imaginable different field of maritime. After the day program, students have the chance to ask a lot of questions to the speakers of the topics they want to focus on, and to learn even more details of the topics in the talk. During the whole activity, students have the chance to brainstorm and network with each other. Even though it has an intense and tight program in terms of information, it leaves unforgettable memories for both its participants and speakers. The organizers has many tasks such as, the gathering of students from all over Turkey, the arrangements of the people who have proven themselves in the sector to participate in the event, the organization of the program throughout the event, and the situation of the participants. These organizers are students who volunteered for this. People who do such a mentally and physically tiring job professionally may be quite natural, but if students volunteer for such and sacrifice their own personal time and accepting that all they get it the participants leaving the event with happiness and satisfaction as a reward for this effort, it means that DÖDER has truly been able to bring maritime students together for one another.
Despite its large size, such an event inherently has a participant capacity. DÖDER offers quotas to students under different headings, and these quotas accept students according to different criterias. Throughout the event, you have to choose one of the opportunities to learn more and meeting more people, because one person cannot be in two places at the same time.
There is almost no similar event, even in the rest of the world, and we definitely have to congratulate DÖDER and the students in it for being able to organize such a crazy, high quality and potential event purely for students and students.
If you want to learn more about DÖDER, you can browse their website and social media accounts.
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