Ozgur Balsoy has worked with me and Nancy McCracked in the
dual role of teaching assistant and researcher. As Kivanc
Dincer explains in his letter, Ozgur addresses his weakness
in Englist (seen in old verbal GRE) in 1995 and now his
command of English is superb and we in fact tend to exploit this
by always using him as TA in our Internet technology classes both
at Syracuse and delivered at a distance. Nancy points out his
excellent reputation in this area.
Ozgur like my other students has a masters degree from Computer
Science at Syracuse and is admitted into the PhD Program.
His research interest builds on class projects developed in
our "Internetics" curriculum and he played a significant role
in the design and implemnentation of our class database which 
although it started as a class project, is used to manage all
our classes for grades, homeworks etc. His PhD topic will probably be
on the use of dynamic XML systems to act as a flexible "middle-tier"
for new generation of web-based education systems.
Ozgur now has full command of the basic technology and I expect him
to be a very succesful researcher. I strongly recommend him
to the FSU PhD program.