Where Systems
Meet Efficiency.

I'm Can Sedefoğlu, a high school senior from Istanbul fascinated by how things flow — airline operations, supply chains, queues, and decisions under constraints. I spend my time on process optimization, operations research problems, and data-driven case studies, and I'm applying to study industrial engineering to turn that curiosity into craft.

I grew up in Istanbul, where I first noticed industrial engineering in the wild. While watching flight schedules, metro turnstiles, and my daily school bus commute, I recognized that they were all struggling with the same problem. That was flow. I was commuting almost 5 hours to and from school each day. One night I mapped out the school bus route by marking each student's address and timed each stop on a navigation app. I made a from-to chart and proposed a rerouting that cut nearly 40 minutes from the daily ride, giving students about 20 extra minutes of sleep each morning. It also reduced fuel use and CO₂ emissions by roughly 15 percent. The new route was implemented. I was hooked.

For a business owned by my relatives, I designed a customer flow system that runs their two burger restaurants as one connected system instead of two separate ones. The first restaurant sits in a busy central area with limited capacity, while the second is the opposite: spacious but quieter. To distribute customers between the two, I built a dynamic queuing and redistribution system with a golf-cart shuttle, minimizing waiting time and lost customers while making full use of the available capacity. The shuttle also created a buzz on social media, effectively promoting the restaurants on its own.

At school, I lean toward the quantitative side: mathematics and physics are my strongest subjects. I taught myself Java (Eclipse) and later Python. With a classmate, I completed a TÜBİTAK 2204-A research project titled “Graph Theory-Based Mathematical Optimization of Power Flow in Smart Grids,” which we implemented in Python using NumPy. What draws me to industrial engineering is exactly that blend — rigorous math applied to messy, human systems.

Beyond academics, I play table tennis at school and in my residential complex. In a doubles match, two players have to move as one. In a one-on-one match, the paddle becomes a natural extension of my hand. There is no room for wasted motion. Two or four people, a table, and a ball give me the most honest lesson in efficiency I know.