After nearly five years of educating children in another northwestern city, Eskişehir, she began studies in 1936 at Ankara University's Department of Hittitology, established the previous year by modern Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Upon receiving her degree in 1940, she began a multi-decade career at Museum of the Ancient Orient, one of three such institutions comprising Istanbul Archaeology Museums, as a resident specialist in the field of cuneiform tablets, thousands of which were being stored untranslated and unclassified in the facility's archives.