In Princeton, Sam is a member of the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows, a group of juniors and seniors committed to humanistic inquiry. He is also a student fellow of the Center for International Security Studies and an undergraduate fellow of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Sam mentioned that his senior thesis tentatively titled “Between Cold War and Decolonization: Turkey and Post-Colonial Afro-Asia, 1951-1960”  analyzes Turkey’s participation in the Bandung Conference of 1955 and its relationship with North African anti-colonial nationalists.

He was also the recipient of the Lawrence Stone and Shelby Cullom Davis Thesis Prize Fellowship. While participating in exchange programs in Russia in high school, Sam became interested in Turkey because of its link to the former Soviet Union across the Black Sea and to the Middle East to its south.

Before he resumed at Princeton, he took a gap year as a policy fellow with the Washington, D.C.-based Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), working part of that time from Turkey with SETF’s cross-border humanitarian assistance to communities in northwestern Syria.

Sam stated that he will be studying for his master’s in History at the University of Oxford. He said that he intends to return to Istanbul to pursue a career focused on the transnational politics of conflict across Eurasia, either as a journalist or with a think tank.