In Turkey, for the preliminary construction cost estimation, a notice, which is updated and published annu­ally by Turkish Ministry of the Environment and Urbanism, known as “unit area cost method” (UACM) is generally employed. However, it’s known that the costs obtained through this method in which only construction area is taken into consideration have significant differences from actual costs. The aim of this study is to compare the cost estimations obtained through “multi layer perceptron” (MLP) and “radial basis function” (RBF), which are commonly used artificial neural network (ANN) methods. The results of MLP and RBF were also compared with the results of UACM and the validity of UACM was interpreted. Dataobtained from 232 public construction projects, which completed between 2003 and 2011 in different regions of Turkey, were reviewed. Consequently, estimated costs obtained from RBF were found to be higher than the actual costs with a 0.28% variance, while the estimated costs obtained from MLP were higher than actual values with a 1.11% variance. The approximate costs obtained from UACM are higher than actual costs with a 28.73% variance. It was found that both ANN methods were showed better performance than the UACM but RBF was superior to MLP.

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The aim of this research has been to investigate the relationship between personality traits and burnout levels of architectural undergraduate students. Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey (MBI) and Five Factor Model were used to collect related data. Analysis of the collected data showed variations in personality traits and burnout levels of students from first to fourth year and revealed that education process was an important role player in personality development and burnout levels of students. Architectural students tended to be more "open to experience" and "extraverted" as they proceeded from the first year to final year without having high levels of "emotional exhaustion". "Emotional exhaustion" was observed together with "neurotic" personality traits of students. Thus, one of the key recommendations of this research is that university counselors should plan and organize guidance programmes by focusing on individual requirements caused by both the student's personality traits and demands of the university education which may vary between both years and departments. Future work of this research will thus focus on civil engineering and computer engineering students in order to determine the effect of departmental differences on burnout levels of students and guide counseling programmes within the University accordingly.

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