Student experience: Game, set and marketing match

I was born in Finland but, when I was three, my dad’s job transferred the family to Singapore, where I spent my childhood and grew up. My parents were both very interested in tennis, which was quite a big and relatively accessible sport in Singapore. I started playing when I was about six years old and, quite quickly, I noticed that, “OK, this is something that I’m actually quite good at.” Tennis became a full-time job on the side of school — I travelled all around Asia, playing in tournaments.

It is quite a hectic and stressful lifestyle. Most days would be packed with morning training, then I’d go to school and then, in the evening, training again. On weekends, I’d play tournaments. It was a lot of work. You sacrifice a lot; you don’t grow up as a normal kid. It’s not possible to go to late-night events or hang out with friends, because there is training the next morning, or travel for a tournament. But you also get a lot of opportunities.

After I graduated from high school, I got a full athletic scholarship to play division one college tennis, for the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I studied economics and my days continued being similar, filled with training, but, on the weekends, I would travel to different universities. It was fun — tennis was what I loved.

When the time came to look for a masters, I started thinking about leaving the US. I had been able to study there because of my scholarship, which paid not only my tuition but accommodation. Without it . . . university studies in the US are just so expensive. At the same time, I had started thinking about going back to my roots. I wanted to feel the Finnish side of me, as I had never really lived there.

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I knew I wanted an international university, where I could study in English. Then I saw that the masters in business and management at Hanken School of Economics offered a specialisation in marketing, which was a perfect fit for how I pictured my future.

The programme was two years long, with a mix of many different courses and a thesis at the end. It was a very international group and a good mix of those who had come straight from the bachelors degree, versus some who had already worked and came back to do their masters. Hanken was smaller than the average US university, which I liked, as it meant students felt part of a community. The classes, being smaller, meant there was plenty of space for group work and interaction with classmates and professors.

There were also a lot of chances to get involved in activities and clubs, so I co-founded the Hanken tennis club. I was part of the masters committee, which organised events and workshops for masters students, and the sports committee, which planned activities for students. There were a lot of opportunities to feel part of the community.

Many of my favourite classes were marketing-related, but I also took a lot of finance and accounting classes to broaden my knowledge. Most interesting were probably strategic marketing and marketing communications, where we learn how to market across cultures. They helped give me a sense of which kind of marketing I wanted to do.

Many people think marketing is essentially advertising, but there’s so much more behind it. For example: how can you grow an audience for a sport? How can you make the experience better for the fans? That’s essentially what I do now. I work for a company called Two Circles, in Bern, in Switzerland. We grow the value of sports, backed by data. We use data to understand sports fans to, for example, grow audiences, increase engagement or improve ticketing strategies. It combines my passion for sports with what I learnt at Hanken on the marketing side.

The main things I took with me from Hanken were soft skills from group projects and presentations that the small class sizes enabled us to have. I learnt how to work with people, to listen and learn from others — how to ask constructive questions and maintain a solution mindset. A lot of those skills came from being active in student unions.

I want to keep working in the sports industry — I really enjoy it. And, one day, I think, I will want to return to Finland. My time at Hanken gave me time to get to know the country, and now Helsinki feels like home. I made a lot of friends there. I built a good base for when, in the future, at some point, I’ll want to move back.