Matilde Pelkonen, MSc (Econ.) and future Educational Psychologist

‘I started my business studies in 2011. I got inspired already in lower secondary school, when I won the school’s economics competition. I was especially interested in the multidisciplinary aspect of business school and how the world is built around trade and business.

I think the best part of my studies was Aalto Fellows, a course by Aalto Ventures Program, which focuses on growth companies. It’s basically a summer trainee programme that starts with a two-week period of getting to know growth companies and the realities of entrepreneurship. The rest of the summer is spent working for startup companies.

Through different companies, I got to see on a practical level what running a growth company is like. The model was built at Stanford University. At the end of the summer, we spent a week in Tel Aviv, which has the world’s largest startup hub after Silicon Valley.

The programme included engineering and art students as well, not just business students. Aalto’s strength is its multidisciplinary character and how experts from different fields are utilised in the studies.

The School of Business gives you the necessary skills to do things yourself and become an entrepreneur. I have had a small entrepreneur inside of me since I was a kid, even though I have not always been aware of that.

The Aalto Fellows summer really sparked my entrepreneurship spirit. During the autumn right after, I completed a self-published book project in Nice, and when I came back, I was recruited to launch the international food delivery service Foodora in Finland. Currently, I am one of the two founding members of a startup called Monochrome that got started in 2016 and connects businesses with social media influencers.

I am extremely intrigued by how consumer choices are made and how to understand them. The most interesting aspect of my studies were courses related to social psychology where we discussed consumption culture and people’s actions related to consumer choices.

I constantly want to study and learn new things in order to seek meaning for my work. Next, I will move on to study educational psychology. I hope that, in the future, I will combine business and educational psychology in my work.'