Photo: Ada Turemis, foreground, at an advertising agency in Istanbul.
Her voice becomes animated and her eyes brighten as she describes a visit she made to Strawberry Park Hot Springs in Colorado.
Once warmed by a thermal pool, Ada Turemis plunged into a mountain stream swollen with snow melt that carried her along to an exit point.
“Oh my gosh. I felt like every cell in my body was wide open and totally alive,” she said.
She had enjoyed an exhilarating experience given her capacity and tendency to say “yes” to opportunities and adventures, not indiscriminately but without timidity.
In December, Ada joined the growing team of employees at TechFarms as an administrative assistant with responsibilities ranging from bookkeeping to event planning. While that may sound pedestrian for an adventurer, she is sure to apply herself to projects that lie beyond her immediate job description — while maintaining focus on prescribed duties.
Too, she is excited about what she sees as TechFarms’ potential to make a consequential difference in the life of Bay County, Florida, and the surrounding region. She likes being associated with the place and sees her own recent job search as illustrative of her new employer’s reason for being.
Ada, who grew up in Turkey in the seaside city of Marmaris not far from Istanbul, holds two college degrees: a bachelor’s degree (art history and advertising) from Syracuse University and an MBA (finance emphasis) from the University of West Florida. Upon completion of her studies in Pensacola — she was sad to see her UWF experience come to a close — she began looking for work in the Panama City Beach area.
She was soon frustrated to find that available jobs were concentrated in the hospitality/restaurant and real estate sectors.
“There’s got to be something better for an MBA to do,” she fumed to herself.
A retirement at TechFarms created the opening she has eagerly filled. Her husband, Sieggy Bennicoff-Yundt, is an industrial and systems engineer who works at TechFarms tenant MSI/Ator Labs as its director of quality assurance. The couple resides at Panama City Beach’s Bay Point community and enjoys tennis. Ada is also into yoga.
She brings a diverse body of experience and successes to TechFarms.
After Syracuse, she went to work for the Armory Show, a massive art fair that was then conducted in a drafty, warehouse-style building on the water at Pier 52 in West Side Manhattan.
Some 250 hard-to-please gallerists participated in the event designed and priced to appeal primarily to qualified art collectors and buyers. Ada dealt with big egos while enjoying the company of aspiring artists who served as event helpers doing whatever needed doing.
When her visa expired, Ada worked two years for an art fair in Istanbul before finding employment at a boutique advertising firm, meeting her future husband and returning to the U.S.
At UWF, while other students were content just to get by, Ada maximized her experience by assisting a professor with a research project on nominal share prices and competing in a hedge fund strategy pitch competition hosted by Georgia State University.
Along with teammate Aaron Korel and mentor Professor K.C. Ma, she traveled to Atlanta when her team qualifyied for the competition’s finals. She and Aaron pitched their strategy to an intimidating panel of judges that included corporate CFOs and big-time hedge fund managers, perhaps none of whom had ever heard of UWF.
UWF placed first, beating out teams from England and large U.S. universities, and claiming the competition’s $10,000 top prize.
“Winning is fun, it turns out,” Ada said.
To be sure, she has a lot more winning to do.
