Organizational culture has been defined in many different ways by various researchers for decades. Lunenburg and Ornstein (2000) define organizational culture as "shared philosophies, ideologies, beliefs, feelings, assumptions, expectations, norms and values" (p. 60). It is a living process as being created, developing and dying. It is not an entity on its own but composed of different elements as artifacts, rules and regulations, values, feelings, interpersonal relations and climate. Organizational culture is one of the key aspects of any organization, and has an impact on various organizational outcomes such as effectiveness and efficiency. In academic environment, culture is one basic element of universities that shape all practices both academic and non academic.The purpose of this study was to describe the culture of the Educational Sciences Department in Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara from the perspectives of research assistants who are in the "Academician Training Program" (ATP) in order to see how assistants view the culture of their department and how they have been affected by the culture. Academician Training Program is a joint program of METU, many state universities and Higher Education Council in Turkey. Many state universities especially in the smaller cities of Turkey select research assistants to study in METU for their PhD after some elimination process. These assistants stay in Ankara and work in METU as research assistants during their PhD and they return to their home university as an academician after graduation. METU has 540 research assistants of ATP; 16 of them are working in Educational Sciences Department. These assistant come from different universities with different backgrounds. Their perception of how they evaluate the culture of the department and how they have been affected by the culture is important as all of these assistants will be instructors in various universities of all around the Turkey. Whether the department can transfer its academic values to these academician candidates and shape their believes and values is the main focus of the study.This study will be a qualitative inqury investigating the effect of department culture on research assistants of ATP and assistants perceptions about the departmental culture. For this purpose, six assistants; three new comers with one to two years experience and three more experienced one working for three to four years, selected purposefully in order to reflect two different views from new comers and old members. Individual interviews were conducted with these six assistants with a structured interview form in order to provide more standardized data gathering process and to get more information rich data with pre-defined questions. Interviews were conducted by the researcher at assistants' offices at a pre-defined time. Interviews were transcribed and coded. In coding, inductive method was applied; codes and themes were constructed basing on the texts without any preliminary coding system. Then, with help of the literature, codes and themes were organized in order to form a coherent and meaningful frame.As a result, four main themes emerged as; elements of organizational culture, enculturation process of the members and change process of the organizational culture and culture metaphors. Each of these themes were digged into in the results part and discussed in detail with implications.Lunenburg, R. C., & Ornstein, A. C. (2000). Educational administration: Concepts and practices. London: Thomson/Wardsworth.