1,500

When I started university, I heard that a newly graduated engineer earned about 1,500 lira. University still looked enormous from where I stood: years of courses, projects, exams, and technical subjects I had not yet encountered. It seemed obvious that by the time I finished, the number would have changed.

Then I graduated. The number was still 1,500. That was surprising, but perhaps temporary; salaries move slowly, markets change, and maybe I had expected too much.

Another four years passed, and new graduates were still hearing roughly the same number. At some point it stopped looking like a salary and started looking like a physical constant. Gravity, the speed of light, the starting salary of an engineer.

The joke worked because almost everything around that number had moved. Rent changed, food prices changed, fuel changed, transportation changed, and the cost of an ordinary evening out changed. Yet 1,500 seemed perfectly comfortable where it was.

As a student, I had imagined graduation as a clean transition. Study engineering, become an engineer, become useful to a company, earn a respectable salary. Real life had removed several steps from that logic. A diploma proved that I had completed a degree; it did not force the market to become impressed.

Later I understood that asking how much “an engineer” earns is almost the wrong question. Which engineer, doing what, in which city, at which company, with what experience and which skills? The title is only the first line of a much longer story.

Still, I remain fond of the old number. Time was moving, Ankara was moving, and I was moving. 1,500 had apparently decided it had already reached its final form.