Writer: Erkin Çam
August 2008

Cappadocia Vocational School, a private college, has been founded by İlke Education and Health Foundation in Mustafapaşa Borough of Ürgüp District of Nevşehir in 2005 in order to empower the young people of Cappadocia in business life and to create an example for Turkish education system. Alev Alatlı, Murat Şengül and Ömer Faruk Berksan are among the founder of the School which accepts the students to the below mentioned programs:
Economics and Administrative Programs: Civil Aviation Transportation Administration, Tourism Guidance, Tourism and Hotel Management, Horsemanship Administration, Banking and Insurance.
Technical Programs: Cookery, Computer Technologies and Programming, Handicrafts, Wine Production Technologies and Viniculture, Horse Coaching, Organic Agriculture and Restoration.
The aim of Cappadocia Vocational School is to reach international standards in education of middle functional grade staff. In order to reach its aim, the School got Extended Charter, necessary to exchange students and academics under Erasmus program and signed agreements with Kazan State University, Kazan Humanities Pedagogy University, Moscow Academy of Tourism and Ukraine Academy of Science. To cover the foreign language need of the region, all the students of the School must join English Language courses for 8 hours in a week in addition; French, Russian and Japanese Languages are elective courses.
Founding Cappadocia Vocational School in Mustafapaşa (Sinasos) which has a fantastic cultural heritage and is situated 5km south of Ürgüp, directly created employment opportunity in the area, developed pensioner for the accommodations of the students, enabled the usage of bed capacity during winter, created diversity in artisan as well as restored the existing ones and increased the financial capacity of local administration. Some of the premises of the School such as Organic Agriculture Implementation Garden constructed in cooperation with Museum Hotel, supporter of Organic Agriculture Program as well as the open air and roofed manej for the interactive trainings of horsemanship program of the School would bring very important contributions to the region. Besides all the locals and even the tourists of the region are very welcome for the cinema, theater performances and the conferences held in the premises of the School and this invitation brings another dimension and to the cultural activities.
The first alumni of the School were in June 2007 and Cappadocia Vocational School follows very close the employment of its students and alumni. The attitude of the School in compulsory internship and employment is like a professional human resource companies; their data base is updated constantly and meets the needs of the related sectors.

Note: This article has been published in Peribacası Cappadocia Culture and Publicity Magazine, August 2008 issue. It is under protection of the copyrights of the magazine. No part of this article may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by electronic, mechanical or other means without prior permission from the owner. www.cappadociaexplorer.com