Kalkan Turkish Local News would like to introduce you to someone who is visiting Kalkan for the first time.

Eileen Dyer is a post-graduate student, from Atlanta, in the USA, who has come to Kalkan to research for her masters degree.

Below, we provide a brief biography of Eileen, and explain a bit about what she is doing in Kalkan, and how you may be able to help her.

Eileen attended Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama and received her BA in religion with a minor study in economics in 2008.

As she completed her degree there, her interest in religion, culture, and economics sparked an interest in development studies, particularly economic development.

Universities in Copenhagen and Utrecht
Following graduation, she attended the University of Copenhagen, Denmark as a guest master's student in the faculty of economics, as a recipient of an Ambassadorial Scholarship from Rotary International.  She focused particularly on the economics in developing countries throughout her year there, while also speaking at, and attending various Rotary engagements across Denmark, and even in the UK.

In the autumn of 2009, Eileen began a master's degree in International Development Studies, at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. She is in Kalkan to do fieldwork, to support her dissertation.

Economic effects of tourism
Eileen is studying the economic effects that tourism, and specifically villa tourism has had on Kalkan. The survey is similar to other studies of this phenomenon that have been done, to measure the economic impact of villa tourism across the world.

But why Kalkan, we asked her. Eileen told Kalkan Turkish Local News that her university had put her in touch with a Turkish PhD student who was studying Tourism in Turkey for her doctoral dissertation.  The student had visited Kalkan before and suggested it to Eileen and Utrecht University as a good place to study tourism and development.  The university approved of the research proposal, and Eileen was on her way to Kalkan!

How you can help
During her research, she will be speaking to a number of local people, to find out first hand about the recent history of Kalkan. By a quirk of fate, the recent survey by KTLN was well timed for Eileen, as it has proved to be a most valuable source of information.

Impressed by the response rate of our survey, Eileen would very much like to tap into this source of information, and she is planning a survey of her own, with questions that are more specific to her dissertation subject.

Kalkan Turkish Local News will be providing whatever support it can to Eileen, and we would ask you, the guests and members of KTLN, to consider helping her too, by taking a little time to answer her forthcoming survey on Kalkan.

We appreciate it is hot on the heels of The KTLN survey, but we hope that many of you will help Eileen with her academic research, which will go towards her masters degree. She has promised to share her findings with KTLN, so we will bring that to you in due course.

Watch out for a further local news article, telling you where to find the survey, and how to take part.