quick note: this happened on november 20, 2025. it is now april 2026. i finally found the time to sit down and write this and i refuse to feel bad about it.
it started as one of those conversations you have with a friend where you’re both just saying things to make yourselves feel better about life.
me and a friend from school - a year behind me - somehow stumbled across Red Hat Summit: Connect 2025. it was going to happen in istanbul. november 20th. we were sitting there in like april or may, i don’t even remember exactly, and one of us said something like “imagine if we just… went.”
and we laughed. because that’s the kind of thing you say, not the kind of thing you do. we’re high school students. istanbul is not next door. Red Hat is an enterprise linux company hosting a professional tech summit, not a school field trip. the whole idea was absurd and we both knew it and that was kind of the point - it was just a nice thing to imagine.
so we kept imagining it. every now and then one of us would bring it up again. wouldn’t it be wild. just as a bit.
then november started actually approaching.
and somewhere in that process the conversation shifted. like, we’d been talking about this for months at this point. it had become this running joke that slowly stopped being a joke. we started actually looking into it. what would it even take? apply, get accepted, convince our parents, get plane tickets, figure out where to stay.
so we said, okay. let’s just apply. worst case they say no and nothing changes.
then our parents said yes.
i don’t think either of us fully processed that at first. we applied, got accepted, and suddenly this thing that lived entirely in the “wouldn’t it be funny” part of our brains was now a calendar event with a flight attached to it. we had plane tickets to istanbul. we had a place to stay. we were going to a Red Hat enterprise summit. as high school students. because we just decided to.
it felt unreal in the best way.
and then, two days before we were supposed to leave, we got the rejection email.
capacity full. application declined.
i just sat there and stared at it for a second. we had plane tickets. we had accommodation sorted. we’d spent months slowly turning this dream into a real plan and now there was an email telling us it wasn’t happening. the flights were already paid for. were we just going to go to istanbul and… not go to the thing we flew there for?
i wrote an email to Red Hat.
i don’t fully remember everything i said in it, i just explained the situation as clearly as i could - that we were students, that we’d planned this for months, that we already had everything booked, that we really wanted to be there. i sent it and tried not to think too hard about whether it would do anything.
it did something.
Çağla Odyakmaz, Senior Marketing Manager at Red Hat Turkey and CIS, read it. understood it. and got us in.
i mean that genuinely - if she hadn’t taken the time to read some email from two random high school students and decide it was worth helping, this whole story ends at “we almost went to istanbul.” instead it becomes everything that came after. i won’t forget that.
so we went.
we flew to istanbul on a Boeing 737 and yes, before you ask, i absolutely talked to the pilots about aviation. 750 hours on MSFS 2024. 1200 hours on X-Plane 12. i know things. they were impressed. this is not up for debate.
the event itself was at this really nice venue and walking in felt surreal. like, this is a professional enterprise tech summit. the kind of thing where the attendees are developers and sysadmins and IT managers from actual companies. and then there’s us, two high school kids with lanyards, trying to look like we belong.
and then we saw the food table.
i want to be clear that i was not prepared for this. donuts. fresh fruit. ice cream. redbulls just sitting there. and a full barista setup - like an actual espresso machine with an actual person running it - and i went back three times because nobody stopped me and the coffee was good and i was having the time of my life. there was alcohol too but i’m underage and even if i wasn’t i don’t really drink, so i can’t speak to that side of things. what i can tell you is that the coffee was excellent and i have no regrets.
we met Haluk Tekin and Cansu Kavılı early on. got to talk to Çağla in person which was genuinely great - putting a face to the person who saved the whole trip. and then there was Ahmed Dahi, who at some point during the day ran a kahoot after a presentation and me and my friend won and he gave us socks.
not just socks. RHEL socks. Red Hat Enterprise Linux. branded. socks. i am going to wear them and feel like the most powerful person in any room.
there was also this one Red Hat employee at the after-event party - really cool guy, from italy, we talked for a while - whose name i have completely blanked on and i feel bad about it but genuinely cannot recover it. if you’re reading this somehow, you were great.
and we ran into two new grads working at Ziraat Bank who were just incredibly easy to talk to. the kind of people you meet at an event and immediately feel like you’ve known for longer than you have.
oh and the labs. i have to talk about the labs.
so the way it worked was you had to pick your lab the day before through the website. one lab per person, limited spots, sign up early. my friend forgot to sign up. so i had to go alone.
i chose the OpenShift Virtualization Hands-on Lab, run by:
- Şafak Kırca
- Emre Özkan
- Tamer Bulut
and it was genuinely great. proper hands-on time with OpenShift, not just someone clicking through slides at you. i actually got to do things. and at some point the topic of my setup came up and i may have flexed my Arch Linux configuration to the instructors, which they appreciated, or at least politely tolerated.
the funny thing - and this kept happening throughout the whole day, not just in the lab - is that the instructors asked to take a photo with us. not the other way around. i don’t fully understand why this kept happening honestly, people would just come up and ask for pictures, but i think being visibly-high-school-aged at an enterprise Red Hat summit makes you kind of a novelty. we were apparently an interesting enough sight that people wanted documentation of it. i’ll take it.
but the two people who really made an impression were Kevin Cleary (Territory Services Manager, Mediterranean region) and Roberto Lopez Gago (Head of Training, Mediterranean region).
at some point during their presentations, they invited us up on stage.
i think the honest reason is that seeing high school students at this event was not something anyone expected, and they wanted to acknowledge it. but whatever the reason, we were up there, and it was one of those moments that you know is going to stick with you. we took a photo together on the stage. i have it. i’m not posting it here because i’m not super comfortable putting my face online, but it exists and i look at it sometimes.
we connected on LinkedIn after. i genuinely want to keep in touch with them. that doesn’t always happen after events like this - sometimes you meet people, exchange info, and it quietly fades. i don’t think this is one of those times.
okay. the merch. let’s talk about the merch.
i came home with:
a Red Hat × Intel collab t-shirt, which is genuinely a nice shirt and not in a “free event shirt that lives at the bottom of a drawer” way. i’ll actually wear this.
a Red Hat backpack, which is also genuinely good. solid build. going into regular rotation.
a Red Hat mint box. a Red Hat fridge magnet that is now on my fridge. Red Hat stickers that went on my laptop.
and the RHEL socks, earned through kahoot combat, which are in a category of their own.
the thing is, the merch is cool. it is. but if you asked me what i’m actually taking away from this, it’s not the backpack.
it’s that this whole thing started as a joke. a “wouldn’t it be funny” conversation in the spring that neither of us actually expected to go anywhere. and then slowly, step by step, it became real - and then almost fell apart at the last second - and then became real again because one person at Red Hat decided a student’s email was worth responding to.
i think about that a lot. how close it came to not happening. how one unanswered email would’ve meant we just had a weird story about flying to istanbul for nothing. instead we got on stage. we made actual connections. we got hands-on with OpenShift. strangers asked to take photos with us for reasons i still don’t fully understand. we came home with socks that say RHEL on them.
if you’re a student and there’s some event or opportunity that feels too big or too unlikely for you to actually pursue - apply anyway. write the email. buy the ticket if you have to. the worst case is usually a lot more survivable than it looks from the outside.
and if you happen to work at Red Hat and you’re reading this: thank you. genuinely.