What did your student life look like? ”I got involved early in student activities, both at my undergraduate universities and in Lund. For me it is super important to have all three: brain work at university, exercising at the gym and outside, as well as ”feel good activities”. The latter is for me my involvement in volunteer organizations, such as AFS Intercultural Programs as an intercultural trainer - and in Lund as an active member of Projekt6, LUS, nations, LundaKarneval, and of course LundaEkonomerna. Through my involvement I met amazing people, many of which I now consider close friends!” How did the road from graduation to your first job look like? ”I started looking for jobs quite early - I thought - well, I did not. Thus it was a bumpy road and I looked for a too diverse range of jobs. A good thing though was that I had all my documents prepared, my CV in three languages and took my time to prepare for interviews and assessment centres. In the end I got my job by being open to a spontaneous interview: I got a call on a Monday morning to attend a job interview on Wednesday - the difficulty was that it had to be in person and I was over 1 000 km away. A spontaneous train ride of 12 hours later payed off and I got the job. Now I am working in a team of five. My first customer is no one less than the church, the oldest public institution.
How has your involvement in the union helped you in your professional career? ”Especially the work with different age groups, students, professors, and staff trained me on professional communication, public institutions, politics, hidden agendas, and much more. Having gained this knowledge, I am now aware of these ways of manipulation and I can reflect upon the customer’s actions much better. By having worked on a board in another country, I am now also aware of all the cultural differences between the Swedish and the German business cultures. With this in mind it is much easier to relate to different behavior - it has made me more flexible in my mind when reacting to certain actions of others - making it much easier for me to handle challenging customers.” What is your favorite memory from LundaEkonomerna? ”My favorite memory is the last weeks of our board work in the middle of 2014, when we all realized how great we worked together as a team and that our extremely different personalities were making a fantastic and very productive blend! ” What does the future hold? ”The future will be even more amazing: looking back, I come from the times of state owned wire telephones and now I have two smartphones. In under a quarter of a century. Maybe we will go vacationing on Mars in 35 years, who knows.”
Text: Philip Wrangberg
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