Scan Magazine | Cover Feature | Louisa Bojesen
Louisa Bojesen “Determination can take you anywhere” By Signe Hansen | Photos: David Bering When Louisa Bojesen greets Scan Magazine at precisely 9.15am, she has just come off air after three hours of live reporting on the financial markets on CNBC’s flagship programme Squawk Box Europe. Realising that we are doing the interview in English, she quickly asks to move the conversation somewhere quieter; she does not want to talk about herself with everybody around – perhaps a hint of modesty that may be attributed to her Danish upbringing. But apart from that a picture of Bojesen, who can count Denmark, the USA, the UK, the Middle East and Ghana among her workplaces, is almost what you would expect to find if you look up the term “international success”. Her day today, like most others, started at 3.30 am, but although, she says, she is not a morning person, Bojesen still thinks of her job as her “dream job”. But then again, the adrenalin that flows with being broadcast live to 350 million households all over Europe should be enough to keep anybody awake and maybe also a bit nerve-wracked. Thrown in at the deep end 34-year-old Louisa Bojesen is, however, not just anybody and although she admits to loving the adrenalin kick, her self-secure and straightforward ways ensure that nobody confuses adrenalin with nervousness. What is characteristic about Bojesen is not so much her typical Danish blonde hair or slender figure; it is how she can make a career that would make most people green with envy sound like a rather minor achievement yet at the same time seem fully to appreciate how privileged she is – an attitude many unsuccessfully try to exude. “When I
started at CNBC, I was quite young and I was thrown in at the deep end. But I had some great people to learn from and I think you learn by doing,” she says. “Determination is 90 per cent of it. If you are determined to do anything, as long as you keep at it and if you are a normal, bright person, eventually you will succeed.” From Birkerød to Chicago Being a famous news presenter was, however, not a lifelong dream of Bojesen’s. No, when growing up in Birkerød, she thought she wanted to be a doctor; but first, the young girl, who because of her father’s job as an economist had already had a taste of international life with him and her American mother in Seattle and Baghdad, chose to move to Chicago to study Political Science, Philosophy and Pre-medicine at Loyola University. Afterwards, she ended up in the city’s banking industry because, she rather puzzlingly explains, that was an industry she did not know anything about. “When I was done with school in the US, it was the mid-nineties. I was still not 100 per cent sure that I wanted to go to medical school so I thought: what do I know very little about and what is super exciting? It was trading,” she explains adding, “I was in the middle of Chicago, a big pulsating city, and I trained at one of the larger financial institutions and ended up working at Chicago Board of Trade. It was a brilliant, absolutely brilliant, and really adrenalin pumping time.” Back to Copenhagen and on to London It was the adrenalin that Bojesen missed when she returned to Copenhagen to take up her medical studies and when an ad came up for CNBC Nordic in 2000, she
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